Katharine Sergeant Angell White was a writer and the fiction editor for The New Yorker magazine from 1925 to 1960. In her obituary, printed in The New Yorker in 1977, William Shawn wrote, "More than any other editor except Harold Ross himself, Katharine White gave The New Yorker its shape, and set it on its course."
Biography
Katharine Sergeant was born to Charles Spencer Sergeant and Elizabeth Shepley in Winchester, Massachusetts on September 17, 1892. She had two older sisters, Elizabeth and Rosamund. She grew up in Brookline, Massachusetts at 4 Hawthorn Road. Katharine's's sister, Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant, a 1903 graduate of Bryn Mawr College, was also a writer. Elizabeth, called "Elsie," wrote books about Willa Cather, poet Robert Frost, and the Pueblo Indians of New Mexico. Katharine graduated from Bryn Mawr College in 1914. On May 22, 1915, she married Ernest Angell, an attorney and the future president of the ACLU, in Brookline, Massachusetts. She began working for Harold Ross at The New Yorker in 1925, six months after its inception. She started out reading unsolicited manuscripts for two hours a day, then quickly moved to full-time work. She proved indispensable as an editor, writer, and shaper of the magazine's advertising policy. She was a literate, elegant, and cultivated woman whom James Thurber described as "the fountain and shrine of The New Yorker." In 1929, she divorced her husband and married E. B. White, a New Yorker writer, whom she had recommended that Ross hire. They were both back at work at The New Yorker the next day. After this marriage, she became known as Katharine S. White. White was deft at handling fiction, poetry, profiles, and casuals. She served as The New Yorker's first fiction editor and helped shape the magazine. She promoted many writers, including Nabokov, John O'Hara, Mary McCarthy, JohnCheever, John Updike, and Ogden Nash. She was the mother of a son, Roger Angell, and daughter, Nancy Angell Stableford. Roger Angell spent decades as fiction editor for The New Yorker and is a well-known baseball writer. Her other son, Joel White, was a naval architect and boat-builder who owned Brooklin Boatyard in Brooklin, Maine. White originally wrote under the name Katharine Sergeant Angell. As Katharine White, her only book, Onward and Upward in the Garden, was published after her death. It is a compilation of her garden articles and journals. Horticulture magazine stated, "Although she never claimed to be more than an amateur, her pieces, especially her famous surveys of garden catalogs, are remarkable for their fierce intelligence and crisp prose." Her husband credits this book project with saving his own life after her death, as it gave him her words every day, and something to work on after she had died.
