At the New York Review of Books blog, Luc Sante, author of Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York, reminisces about his time at the magazine:
The scale of the office was intimate and I sat right in the middle of it, very self-conscious at all times but generally invisible to the great and the good who passed by. I imagined an early scene in some novel, maybe by Dreiser: the young clerk at his desk, his pen suspended in midair as he observes this or that eminence on parade. Isaiah Berlin, Lincoln Kirstein, Joan Didion, the debonair Murray Kempton, V. S. Pritchett who still sometimes turned in holograph manuscripts, Edward Gorey towering in his raccoon coat and white Keds. Not many of the names meant much to me at first; I came from another culture in another part of town.
Has Sante written anything on Gorey? It seems like a perfect match… or is that just me?