As someone who has spent nearly 40 years working as an editor, I’m of course continually on the lookout for statements that praise editors. I know, I know–you’d think it would be easy to find examples of such a widely held sentiment. But it’s harder than you might think. However, in the 100th anniversary issue of The New Yorker magazine earlier this year, Jill Lepore comes through with some sweet music for the ears of editors everywhere (“War of Words: Editors, writers, and the making of a magazine,” February 17 and 24, 2025, pp. 48+). She writes:
Harold William Ross, who founded The New Yorker a century ago, had a rule that no one should ever write about writers, because writers are boring, except to other writers, and he figured the same was true about editors–only it was more true, because no one should even know an editor’s name. … Most editors remain unsung. To be unknown is, ordinarily, to be underestimated. “The only great argument I have against writers, generally speaking, is that many of them deny the function of an editor, and I claim editors are important,” Ross once wrote. For him, editors were worth more than writers in the way that a great batting coach was worth more than a great batter. “Writers are a dime a dozen,” Ross told James Thurber. “What I want is an editor.” Writers were children; editors were adults. “I can’t find editors,” Ross fumed. “Nobody grows up.” …
Ross also found it useful–and this was a pretty clever trick–to tell writers that the more they balked at being edited, the less worthy they were of being published. “The worse the writer is, the more argument; that is the rule,” he informed one very quarrelsome contributor. Stating this rule was an exceptionally effective way of getting a writer to pipe down. Then, too: it happens to be true. (I promise that my editor did not write that last sentence–he doesn’t even agree with it.)
The relationship between an editor and a writer can be as intimate as an affair and as ineffable as a marriage, but is also likely to involve two perfect strangers warily guarding a precise measure of distance: N95-masked and six feet apart, like pandemic shoppers, or flintlock-armed at ten paces, like eighteenth century duelists. “As to your coming to the office, we should be delighted to have you, though I should tell you we aren’t very impressive to look at,” one editor gently warned one of her writers in 1967.
When I first took on the job of Managing Editor of the Journal of Economic Perspectives, back in 1986, one of my fears was that it would involve successive bouts of mortal combat with a string of economist-authors. (Another fear was that the journal would fail to launch, so I would never have an opportunity for successive bouts of mortal combat with a string of economist-authors.) But over the years, I’ve been delighted to discover that the overwhelming majority of JEP authors have been positive and supportive of my editing efforts.
Yes, it does seem true in my experience that the authors who most object to being edited are often in the lowest quintile as writers. And yes, contrary to the common view that editors closely resemble Zeus throwing thunderbolts, we editors remain not very impressive to look at.
