PROFILE of Corydon (pop. 3, 107), seat of Harrison County, in Southern Indiana. It is situated in a pleasant valley some 20 miles west of Louisville. It is…
Best New Yorker Articles of 1979
Explore 53 featured picks from The New Yorker's 1979 issues.
53 picks · 53 issues · Top author: Elizabeth Drew (4)
Most featured section: Fiction
Featured Picks
Dina, 20 years old, stays in the states to look for a husband when her mother, the writer's cousin, goes back to Greece. Dina has a boyfriend named …
A REPORTER AT LARGE about the Democratic midterm Party Conference in Memphis, in December, the second midterm conference it has had. Discusses the reasons …
A REPORTER AT LARGE about the New York newspaper strike. New contract terms were finally established last November, after a pressmen's strike had shut …
Fiction, from 1979: “I shall grow up to be a tall, graceful, and altogether beautiful woman, and I shall impose on large numbers of people my will and also, for my own amusement, great pain.”
REPORTER AT LARGE about Viking 1, the first of two spacecraft, equipped with instruments for detecting life, which landed on Mars in the summer of 1976. …
REPORTER AT LARGE about findings after Viking 2 landed on Mars on Aug. 7, 1976. Three biologists, Vance Oyama Norman Horowitz and Gilbert V. Levin, …
From 1979: John McPhee’s profile of “Otto,” the mysterious chef who served him the greatest meals of his life.
An account of a long night with visits to a great many restaurants and night clubs. The writer starts out with Earl at the Cafe Chromosome - it was her …
Helen is staying at her father's summer house in Port Brent, a lakeside resort town in Ohio. Her estranged husband, Terry, is in Detroit. Helen and her…
Do they lie? Fervently. Do they steal? Only silver and gold. Do they remember? I am in constant touch. Hardly a day passes. The children. Some can't …
REPORTER AT LARGE about attending last summer's centennial celebration of the Last Indian Raid in Kansas. Since about 1956 such a celebration has been …
PROFILE of writer Graham Greene, 74, interviewed from his flat in Antibes, in the South of France. His life is balanced on a hairbreadth brink between …
A REPORTER AT LARGE about roguish Oklahoma politician and businessman, Gene Stipe, a 52-year-old trial attorney and Democratic state senator who lives in …
REPORTER AT LARGE about this year's Congress, which has been exceptionally slow in getting started. One reason is that the agenda is not very inviting.…
Parody of the way Gov. Jerry Brown, of California, speaks. Press interview with Gov. Beige in the question-and-koan format Gov. Beige prefers. Q: "Gov., …
Jack Schmidt's business is raising funds from federal and corporate sources for artists with weird projects. He was a private-eye until Ollie, the …
PROFILE of Robert S. Strauss, 60, officially the United States' Special Representative for Trade Negotiations. He has the title of Ambassador, and is …
Writer remembers an incident that took place when he was a young man in Memphis, Tenn. during the thirties. The week before his wedding to a society girl, …
In 1948 a Communist govt. was established in Czechoslovakia. Now it is 1971 and Mirek, a scientist, at first embraced Communism and then criticized it. …
An Englishman watches a tennis championship on television and the British team loses. When the game finishes, the man goes into the kitchen and sees a bee.…
REPORTER AT LARGE about the Sinai and the writer's visit there in 1978. The Sinai is more a wilderness than a desert. The Sinai triangle covers 23,500 …
Kenneth Tynan surveys the extraordinary but short-lived career of the film star Louise Brooks, and interviews Brooks herself, a vehement, unself-pitying seventy-one-year-old with perfect recall, who remembers encounters with Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, and G. W. Pabst, the director whose film “Pandora’s Box” made her an enduring legend.
Fiction, from 1979: “I don’t think it’s right to complain about the character of the dying or start hustling all their motives into the spotlight like that.”
Part 1 of Philip Roth’s 1979 novel about a young writer who discovers the strains of literary life as a guest at the Berkshires home of his idol.
Part Two Nathan Zuckerman, staying overnight in the Berkshire home of famous writer E.I. Lonoff, attempts to write a letter to his father, in Newark, who …
PROFILE of the writer's mother (Shanti Devi Mehta) & history of her family, a Hindu family in India. Writer tells, especially, about her father, called…
PROFILE of the writer's mother, Shanti Devi Mehta, born Aug. 16, 1908.
PROFILE of Shanti Devi Mehta, the writer's mother, Mamaji. The Mehtas lived in a large family house in Lahore. India, which was completed in Nov., 1929…
Anthony Bailey profiles the English figurative painter at work, in New York, on the sets and costumes for a production of the opera “The Magic Flute,” in Glyndebourne, England, during the years following the release of his biographical documentary “A Bigger Splash.”
A woman returning to San Francisco from a trip finds that her airline has lost one of her suitcases, which contained a notebook she had been keeping. Her …
When Alec Webb, an Englishman, learns he is dying, he moves with his wife Barbara and 3 children to a house on the Riviera. Barbara's brothers in Wales…
Richard Lucas, a biology professor in his mid-fifties, is at his cabin on a New Jersey lake, trying to write a letter refusing a job he has already …
REPORTER AT LARGE about the commotion caused by the Carter Administration in a 2 1/2 week period in July: the cancellation of the President's energy …
Veronica Geng’s 1979 review of Francis Ford Coppola’s film about Vietnam, starring Martin Sheen and Marlon Brando.
PROFILE of Mayor Edward Koch (who became Mayor in Jan. 1978). He was the second of three children, born in the Bronx in 1924. His parents were poor Jewish …
Fiction, from 1979: After their parents are drowned in a capsized ferry, two sisters in Australia move with their half sister, Dora, to a house by the sea.
PROFILE (all names fictitious) of an Italian Communist family called Cecchi, in the Umbrian village which the writer calls San Vincenzo.
Writer recalls his boyhood in Lincoln, III. in the early 1920's. On a winter morning a tenant farmer living nearby, Lloyd Wilson, was found shot dead. …
Fiction, from 1979: I told my husband, I’ve just written a poem about love. What a good idea, he said.
REPORTER AT LARGE about Mexican oil and gas reserves, their effect on the Mexican economy, and the difficult negotiations between the U.S. and Mexico over …
REPORTER AT LARGE about a summit meeting a few weeks ago in Havana, of the Nonaligned Nations. The meeting, with 94 participants, lasted a fortnight. Fidel…
REPORTER AT LARGE about the energy crisis. Since last July there is a new energy plan. Pres. Carter proposed a massive commitment of funds & resources to …
PROFILE of three New York drummers: Tommy Benford, Freddie Moore and Sonny Greer. Tells about the changing style of jazz drumming in the twenties and …
REPORTER AT LARGE about the U.S. Marines' "reinforcement training exercise" at Guantanamo Bay, a U.S. naval base in Cuba. Writer flew to Guantanamo Bay…
Sandor Speck, 40, owns a small art gallery on the Left Bank in Paris. His first gallery, on the Right Bank, was blown up by Basque separatists. Speck's…
The writer, Ruth, goes to a poetry reading held in the Back Bay section of Boston with her friend Walker Potter. Walker, nearly 30, lives with his' …
PROFILE of physicist Hans Albrecht Bethe, 73. Because of his encylopedic knowledge and personal contributions in many areas of physics, he has been called …
PROFILE of German-born physicist Hans Bethe. Tells about some of his wartime projects before he became a citizen in Mar., 1941. Tells about the early …
PROFILE of physicist Hans Bethe. Since 1974-the year of the Arab oil embargo-he has devoted most of his time to the energy problem. We must look forward to…
PROFILE of Pella, pop. 7,800, in Marion County in south-central Iowa, some 40 miles southeast of Des Moines. The town had its origin in the religious …
PROFILE of Patrick Oliphant, 44, the political cartoonist for the Washington "Star". He's had a good relationship with the editors - Jim Bellows, when …