Maraú Península: Profiles and Portraits

From The New Yorker’s archive: a selection of compelling portraits and sketches, in celebration of the magazine’s ninety-seventh anniversary.
View in browser | Update your preferences

Profiles and Portraits

The writer Janet Flanner is remembered primarily for her insightful dispatches during her long tenure as The New Yorker’s Paris correspondent. Yet just as deserving of note are the eclectic, compelling Profiles she wrote, of figures ranging from Picasso and Bette Davis to Hitler. In 1929, she profiled the novelist Edith Wharton, who was then living as an expat in the French countryside. Flanner’s Profile, at turns irreverent and poignant, captures Wharton’s evolution as a chronicler of social mores and the intricate taxonomies within the beau monde from which she emerged. “She has always suffered the disadvantage of being an outsider—even in the city of her birth, after she became a popular novelist,” Flanner writes. “New York never forgave her for having been born in New York and writing about it.” Flanner’s essay delights, in part, because it presents a master profiler offering a sly, skillful portrait of a writer who was herself one of the past century’s preëminent literary portraitists.

This week, as The New Yorker celebrates its ninety-seventh anniversary, we’re bringing you a selection of Profiles from our archive. In “Eclectic, Reminiscent, Amused, Fickle, Perverse,” George W. S. Trow writes about Ahmet Ertegun, the co-founder of Atlantic Records, who during his long career worked with Ray Charles, Aretha Franklin, Otis Redding, and many more. (Ertegun’s “pursuit of novelty, vogue, and distraction leads him into situations that most people would find boring or fatuous; but, just as Proust is said to have seen in the presence of a boring duchess the representative of seven centuries of duchesses, Ahmet can perhaps see in the most unrewarding night club, in the most unnourishing dinner party, in the most tiresome rock-and-roll singer a descendant of one of the American archetypes that fascinated him in his youth.”) In “The Shadow Act,” Hilton Als explores the radically innovative work of the artist Kara Walker. (“Walker’s vision . . . is of history as trompe-l’oeil. Things are not what they seem, because America is, literally, incredible, fantastic—a freak show that is almost impossible to watch, let alone to understand.”) In “Withdrawing with Style from the Chaos,” Kenneth Tynan examines the life of the British playwright Tom Stoppard. In “Show Dog,” Susan Orlean trains her focus on perhaps the most unlikely subject in this group, a Westminster named Biff Truesdale. (“If I were a bitch, I’d be in love with Biff Truesdale. Biff is perfect. He’s friendly, good-looking, rich, famous, and in excellent physical condition. He almost never drools.”) In “Secrets of the Magus,” Mark Singer considers the creative ingenuity of the magician and sleight-of-hand artist Ricky Jay. In “White Like Me,” Henry Louis Gates, Jr., writes about the life of Anatole Broyard, a literary critic who reinvented himself by denying his true identity. Finally, in “Covering the Cops,” from 1986, Calvin Trillin profiles the dauntless Edna Buchanan, Miami’s top crime reporter of that era. “In Miami, a few figures are regularly discussed by first name among people they have never actually met,” Trillin writes. “One of them is Fidel. Another is Edna.”

—Erin Overbey, archive editor