I propose a new category: works of fiction that originally appeared in The New Yorker that later took on a life of their own apart from the magazine. Criteria for inclusion in the group would include authentic fame, to the point that people uninterested in or unacquainted with the magazine would still have heard of it or might have some well-defined attitude towards it. Revelation that the item originally appeared in The New Yorker might come as a mild surprise.
A relevant anecdote: when I was in college (this was in about 1990), I was chatting with a friend of mine, a decidedly unliterary type, a poli-sci major who later went into finance. He was telling me about this great sci-fi story he had once read, about this contraption that could insert people into novels. About halfway through his account, my face took on a look of bemused recognition. Once he was done, I said, “You know who wrote that story? Woody Allen.” I can still hear his delighted hoot of astonishment in my mind.
This sort of thing represents a tremendous accomplishment for a work of fiction, I think. Indeed, it’s arguably close to the highest “social” accomplishment that a work of fiction can attain, that it nevertheless affects people who don’t even care about books that much. You can be sure that you’ve entered the social network at large when your song is converted into Muzak form for consumption in supermarkets, you know?
For the same reason, I think the list of such works is very, very short. There’s a danger here of “merely” listing very often anthologized works, but suffice to say there’ll be some overlap. The two criteria, “taking on a life of its own” and “people would be surprised by New Yorker origins,” are not at all the same thing, so some may qualify on one but not the other.
Here’s my list in progress, in chronological order:
James Thurber, “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty,” March 18, 1939
James Thurber, “The Catbird Seat,” November 14, 1942
J.D. Salinger, “A Perfect Day for Bananafish,” January 31, 1948
Shirley Jackson, “The Lottery,” June 26, 1948
John Updike, “A&P,” July 22, 1961
Woody Allen, “The Kugelmass Episode,” May 2, 1977
Philip Roth, “The Ghost Writer,” June 25, 1979
Raymond Carver, “Where I’m Calling From,” July 19, 1982
Annie Proulx, “Brokeback Mountain,” October 13, 1997
Almost all of Salinger’s stories have become part of the culture at large, even as any informed reader knows where they first appeared. Updike’s story is much anthologized, but I don’t know how much ordinary readers care about it—I think it’s a legitimate criticism of Updike’s outsize reputation (obviously quite deserved) that he has never created a fictional character with half the popular currency of, say, Portnoy. (Rabbit? Maybe. But Rabbit is not a creature of The New Yorker, alas.)
Can you think of any others? I can’t, but I’m sure there are plenty of good candidates I haven’t listed so far. Did any of Nabokov’s stories acquire its own fame at large? Irwin Shaw? John Cheever? John O’Hara? What stories have taken flight, like Charlotte’s baby spiders, far away from The New Yorker?
—Martin Schneider