george w.s. trow, and now he's dead, obits, the new yorker, tina brown

And Now He's Dead: George W.S. Trow

George W.S. Trow, the media critic and essayist, has died at the age of 63. Trow is best known for Within the Context of No Context, an article he wrote for the New Yorker (they've made part of it available here) and later expanded into a book. (Also worth a read: My Pilgrim's Progress.) Trow's thirty year association with the New Yorker ended in 1994, when then-editor Tina Brown brought on Roseanne Barr to guest edit an issue. The Times obit quotes the lacerating back-and-forth between Trow and Brown:

In his note of resignation, Mr. Trow likened Ms. Brown to someone selling her soul "to get close to the Hapsburgs — 1913."
Ms. Brown shot back, in a note of her own: "I am distraught at your defection, but since you never actually write anything, I should say I am notionally distraught."

Trow's major thesis, that mass media and a cultural obsession with celebrity were ruining society as we know it, is borne out pretty much each day on this website and every other. Rest in peace, George.

George Trow, 63, a Critic of American Culture, Dies [NYT]
Within the Context of No-Context (excerpt)
I Cover Carter [NYer]

11:20 AM on Fri Dec 1 2006
By balk
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Monte Wooley at 12:24 PM on 12/01/06
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God bless G.W.S. Trow. Once a living rebuke to the pale imitations who followed him into media criticism, he'll now stand forever as an immortal alternative to mediacrity.
Dickdogfood at 12:44 PM on 12/01/06
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Connectedness Index: 174

Not an alternative to mediacrity, so much as a more rarified flavor of it. I mean, crimony, the whole fedora thing.
penalcolony at 03:10 PM on 12/01/06
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A brave, perceptive, and honest man, who carried through life a playful but heavy heart until it simply broke.

Even while reading My Pilgrim's Progress when it first came out, I wondered whether he would ever be able to write at length again. Now, it seems, we know.
RPMCESTMOI at 08:21 PM on 12/08/06
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I loved George's mind. He was criticized as opaque, arch, difficult. He was not always easy, but when I edited the work for book publication...he would work over the piece with Shawn (Mr. Shawn, to him) and then I would have a go as his book publishing editor.. If I understood and believed the argument it was off to copy-editing.
Often, I would read the work aloud while my wife drove us to Tanglewood on the weekend from Boston. It helped to hear and to have her great critical faculties involved. Since I hear when I read silently this became just another exercise.
He was, as you suggest, so right.
We had lost veracity, authority, a sense of personal identity, lost the latter to the external nobodyof the media world. We have lost it. We are the shadow pwople chasing even paler shadows.

In addition to other non-fiction work, George wrote two wonderful plays, Elizabeth Dead and The Tennis Game. Great drama, great commentary. Two plays that should be in revival.

I am so proud to see that year after year since Within The Context... the recognition of the genious of the work and the importance of this man, now dead too young, increased. I am also proud to have been involved as a midwife in the process of bring his work to a larger public.

Yrs,
McD