The moment when your career begins

+ some very brief paywalled Jacob Savage thoughts

Hello friends.

I recently read a biography of Katherine S. White, the first fiction editor of The New Yorker. I zipped through it in an afternoon. At some point, towards the end of the book, she decides to retire from her job, and I thought, “No! Not already! You’re so young!” She was sixty-five. She lived another seventeen years, but she was tired, she was ready. She had about twenty-five years at the magazine. Because of those twenty-five years, a biography was written about her by Amy Reading, and last year this biography nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for Nonfiction.

Before she got this New Yorker job she was a married mother of two children, living in New York, the wife of a lawyer, occasionally publishing freelance pieces. But her neighbor introduced her to Harold Ross, the first editor of the journal—at this point it was only six months old—and she got hired to read the slush, the unsolicited manuscripts. When she was hired by The New Yorker she was in her mid-thirties and was about ten years out of college.

If something good is going to happen for you, career-wise, it usually happens in your thirties sometime. I’ve been reading a lot of biographies lately (for a piece I’m writing about The New Yorker) and time and again something good happens for these women sometime in their mid-thirties.