Katharine Angell White

White graduated fourth in her Bryn Mawr College Class of 1914. She started out at The New Yorker in 1925 six months after its inception reading unsolicited manuscripts for two hours a day. She quickly moved to full-time work and proved indispensable as an editor, writer, and a shaper of the magazine's advertising policy. Extremely literate and an elegant and cultivated woman, Thurber described her as "the fountain and shrine of The New Yorker." In 1929, she left her first husband, a lawyer, and married the young writer she had recommended be hired by Ross- E.B. White. They were both back at work at The New Yorker the next day. She was a woman of integrity and had a refined sense of good taste which showed in her deft handling of verse, profiles, and casuals. She served as the first Head of Fiction. In her obituary, printed in The New Yorker in 1977, William Shawn wrote that "More than any other editor except Harold Ross himself, Katharine White gave The New Yorker its shape, and set it on its course."

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