Wigwag (magazine)
Encyclopedia
Founded by Alexander "Lex" Kaplen, who worked at The New Yorker, Wigwag eschewed celebrity coverage in favor of personal and literary writing. A test issue was put on newsstands in the summer of 1988, and the magazine formally debuted in October 1989. The magazine attracted writers such as Peter Matthiessen
Peter Matthiessen
Peter Matthiessen is a two-time National Book Award-winning American novelist and non-fiction writer, as well as an environmental activist...
, Terry McMillan
Terry McMillan
Terry McMillan is an American author. Her interest in books comes from working at a library when she was sixteen. She received her BA in journalism in 1986 at University of California, Berkeley. Her work is characterized by strong female protagonists.Her first book, Mama, was published in 1987...
, Garry Wills
Garry Wills
Garry Wills is a Pulitzer Prize-winning and prolific author, journalist, and historian, specializing in American politics, American political history and ideology and the Roman Catholic Church. Classically trained at a Jesuit high school and two universities, he is proficient in Greek and Latin...
, Alex Heard, Sousa Jamba and Nancy Franklin, but despite a circulation of 120,000, and despite being financially successful, ceased publication when the Gulf War
Gulf War
The Persian Gulf War , commonly referred to as simply the Gulf War, was a war waged by a U.N.-authorized coalition force from 34 nations led by the United States, against Iraq in response to Iraq's invasion and annexation of Kuwait.The war is also known under other names, such as the First Gulf...
broke out in 1991 and the economy entered a recession. It published its last issue in February 1991. In its brief lifetime it reached a circulation of close to 200,000 and became a brand name signifying the qualities it represented: family-feeling, sweetness of character, quietly beautiful prose, an appreciation of the qualities of non-metropolitan America.
The legend of Wigwag's founding by a group of young exiles from The New Yorker - an exodus which followed The New Yorker's acquisition by Conde Nast and Conde Nast's subsequent dismissal of The New Yorker's longtime editor William Shawn
William Shawn
William Shawn was an American magazine editor who edited The New Yorker from 1952 until 1987.-Education and Early Life:...
- attracted an enormous amount of attention to its launch and early publication. Once launched, it quickly became a success d'estime, and critics often called it the "Anti-Spy" - in reference to the funny, cruel and cynical New York magazine of that name. Many saw the two magazines as rivals for media attention - neither survived the 1991 recession (although Spy lingered on in a brief afterlife). Contemporary observers thought that the "parent ship," The New Yorker itself, then edited by Robert Gottlieb, also saw itself as threatened by Wigwag during Wigwag's lifetime. Wigwag proposed a kind of counter-reality to the brittle sophistication which magazines like The New Yorker and Spy aspired to - offering, instead of The New Yorker's famed "Talk of the Town" section, its own wistfully titled opening section, "Letters from Home."
Notable staffers at Wigwag include Nancy Holyoke, who went on (with the help of Harriet Brown
Harriet Brown
Harriet Brown is an American writer, magazine editor, and professor of magazine journalism at the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University...
, another Wigwag editor, now an assistant professor at the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications
S. I. Newhouse School of Public Communications
The S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications is the communications school at Syracuse University. It has programs in print and broadcast journalism; advertising; public relations; and television and film....
) to found American Girl magazine at Pleasant Company in Wisconsin, Caroline Fraser, the author of a noted history of the Christian Science Church, and Evan Cornog, now associate dean of the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism. One of the most significant contributors to Wigwag's identity was its art director, the distinguished illustrator and designer Paul Davis
Paul Brooks Davis
Paul Brooks Davis is an American graphic artist.-Biography:Paul Brooks Davis, better known as Paul Davis, was born in 1938 in Centrahoma, Oklahoma...
. Many have observed that Wigwag's editorial and design innovations under Kaplen and Davis were later adopted by Tina Brown
Tina Brown
Tina Brown, Lady Evans, CBE , is a journalist, magazine editor, columnist, talk-show host and author of The Diana Chronicles, a biography of Diana, Princess of Wales. Born a British citizen, she took United States citizenship in 2005 after emigrating in 1984 to edit Vanity Fair...
and implemented at The New Yorker when she became its editor.