New York Days

A sequel to American author and journalist Willie Morris's memoir, North Toward Home, New York Days (1993) chronicles Morris's tenure as the youngest editor-in-chief in the history of Harper's Magazine. The Los Angeles Times calls New York Days "enlightening, revelatory, touching, and uproariously funny."

While North Toward Home covers Morris's idyllic upbringing in rural Mississippi and his college days at the University of Texas, New York Days begins—fittingly enough—with his arrival in New York City in 1963 at the age of 29. Having left his job as the editor of the Texas Observer in Austin, Morris joins the staff of Harper's Magazine as an associate editor. A storied journal of politics and letters dating back to 1850, Harper's Magazine is the second oldest continuously running monthly magazine, second only to Scientific American.

At the time, Harper's editor-in-chief is Jack Fischer, whom Morris perceives to be unwilling to invest sufficient money and resources to make Harper's a magazine worthy of its legacy. He can think of no other reason Fischer publishes so many stories by "by rich people, diet faddists, housewives, dilettantes who indulged in quaint foreign travel, and verbose retired professors and diplomats." That changes in the spring of 1967 when 32-year-old Morris is chosen to replace Fischer, becoming the youngest-ever editor-in-chief in the history of the magazine.



In describing his initial vision for the magazine, Morris says he wants to restore Harper's once again into something  "that had to be read, to take on the 'Establishment,' to assume the big dare, to move out to the edge, to make people mad, to edify and arouse and entertain, to tell the truth." To achieve this, Morris relies on his team of contributing editors, a veritable all-star squad of ambitious young writers. The team includes David Halberstam, an investigative reporter who in 1964 won the Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting for his work in The New York Times on the Vietnam War. His reporting from the conflict was some of the earliest to give Western readers an accurate depiction of conditions in Vietnam, exposing the US government's optimistic public statements regarding the conflict as little more than propaganda. At Harper's, Halberstam embarks on an ambitious series of articles analyzing former President Kennedy's foreign policy decision-making with respect to Vietnam. These articles form the foundation for Halberstam's universally acclaimed 1972 book, The Best and the Brightest.

Morris also brings in Larry L. King, a fellow Texan who quickly establishes himself as a leading figure in what comes to known as "New Journalism." While King covers a wide range of subjects for Harper's including sports, music, and politics, his most enduring contribution to the magazine is his 1970 essay, "Confessions of a White Racist." When King expands the essay into a book in 1972, he earns praise from Maya Angelou along with a National Book Award nomination. Rounding out Morris's staff of contributing editors is John Corry, a native Brooklynite capable of exploring the counterculture of the 1960s from wholly unpredictable perspectives; and Marshall Frady, a Georgia native and reporter on the Civil Rights Movement whose biography of Alabama's segregationist Governor George Wallace is considered a groundbreaking examination of Southern politics.

Aside from these four mainstays, Morris seeks out contributions from some of the greatest writers of the mid-century, including Philip Roth, Joan Didion, John Updike, and Pauline Kael. Morris's most fruitful collaboration is with the writer Norman Mailer. Assigned to produce 10,000 words about 1967's March on the Pentagon anti-Vietnam War demonstration, Mailer submits 90,000 words instead. Rather than try to pare the article down or advise Mailer to publish it in book form, Morris prints the article in its entirety under the title "Armies of the Night." An eventual Pulitzer Prize recipient, "Armies of the Night" is the longest article ever published by Harper's or any other magazine for that matter.



Mailer finds even greater success still in the pages of Harper's when Morris publishes Mailer's meditation on the women's rights movement, "The Prisoner of Sex: On Women and Men, Liberation and Subjection, the Body, the Spirit, and Physical Love." With "Prisoner of Sex" as its cover story, the March 1971 edition becomes the highest-selling issue in the history of Harper's Magazine. But despite its record-breaking sales, this is the last issue of Harper's published with Morris at its head. For Harper's wealthy owner John Cowles, Jr., "Prisoner of Sex" is only the latest in a series of grievances Cowles harbors toward Morris and his tenure as editor-in-chief. Cowles believes Harper's has become too unfocused, too expensive, and most of all too liberal under Morris. Upon hearing Cowles's proposal to dramatically reorganize the magazine, Morris rejects it and promptly resigns. Resignations from his contributing editors follow shortly thereafter.

New York Days is a fascinating portrayal of a golden era in American journalism.