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The Receptionist

An Education at The New Yorker (Digital Edition)

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The Receptionist

By: Janet Groth
Narrated by: Susanna Burney
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About this listen

Thanks to a successful interview with the painfully shy E.B. White, a beautiful, 19-year-old, blue-eyed blonde from the cornfields of Iowa lands a job as a receptionist at The New Yorker magazine. There she stays two decades, becoming general all-around factotum - watching and registering the comings and goings, marriages and divorces, scandalous affairs, failures, triumphs, and tragedies of the eccentric inhabitants of the 18th floor. Though she dreamed of becoming a writer, she never advanced at the magazine.

This memoir of a particular time and place is as much about why that was so as it is about Groth's fascinating relationships with John Berryman, Joseph Mitchell, Muriel Spark, as well as E.J. Kahn, Calvin Trillin, Renata Adler, Peter DeVries, Charles Addams, and many other New Yorker contributors and bohemian denizens of Greenwich Village in its heyday. Eventually, Groth would have to leave The New Yorker in order to find herself.

©2012 Original material © 2012 Janet Groth. Recorded by arrangement with Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, a division of Workman Publishing Company, Inc. (P)2012 (p) 2012 HighBridge Company Authors

Critic Reviews

“ The New Yorker’s many fans will enjoy Judith West’s warm narration of this behind-the-scenes look at the iconic magazine." ( Library Journal)
“A nostalgic, wistful look at life inside one of America’s most storied magazines, and the personal and professional limbo of the woman who answered the phone.” ( Kirkus Reviews)
“[Groth] is witty, honest, and self-deprecating, without whining, and quite a good role model.” ( Booklist)

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