Katharine Sergeant Angell White (born Katharine Sergeant; September 17, 1892 – July 20, 1977) was an American writer and the fiction editor for The New Yorker magazine from 1925 to 1960. In her obituary, printed in The New Yorker in 1977, William Shawn wrote, "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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Biography
Katharine Sergeant was born to Charles Spencer Sergeant and Elizabeth Shepley in Winchester, Massachusetts on September 17, 1892. She had two older sisters, Elizabeth and Rosamund. She grew up in Brookline, Massachusetts at 4 Hawthorn Road. Katharine's sister, Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant, a 1903 graduate of Bryn Mawr College, was also a writer, who wrote books about Willa Cather (a personal friend), poet Robert Frost, and the Pueblo Indians of New Mexico.
Katharine graduated from Bryn Mawr College in 1914. On May 22, 1915, she married Ernest Angell, an attorney and the future president of the ACLU, in Brookline, Massachusetts.
She began working for Harold Ross at The New Yorker in 1925, six months after its inception. She started out reading unsolicited manuscripts for two hours a day, then quickly moved to full-time work. She proved indispensable as an editor, writer, and shaper of the magazine's advertising policy. She was a literate, elegant, and cultivated woman whom James Thurber described as "the fountain and shrine of The New Yorker." The writer and critic Nancy Franklin observed of White's crucial role at The New Yorker, "In some ways, Katharine White's ambitions for the magazine surpassed Ross's: she pushed him to publish serious poetry (while also attempting to keep the flame of light verse alive as the supply of talented practitioners dwindled over the years); she had adventurous tastes, and enlarged the scope of both the magazine's fiction and the factual pieces; and she saw that the magazine's sense of humor, in its writing and in its cartoons, could be raised above the level of a 'comic paper', which is how Ross sometimes referred to his magazine."