SWIFT.(The Talk of the Town)

A selection of writings by Trow

George W. S. Trow, whose utterly original voice and astringent sensibility were defining features of The New Yorker for three decades, died at the end of November, in Naples, Italy, a city that had been his home for the past five years. He was sixty-three.

From adolescence on, George William Swift Trow was a cult figure of sorts, whose fame, though for a time considerable, was a lagging indicator of his influence, which made itself felt through his personal and literary impact on other writers and on certain institutions, notably but not exclusively this magazine. He was an essayist, aphorist, journalist, satirist, and analyst (and annalist) of what he once labelled, with characteristically arch capitalization, Mainstream American Cultural Artifacts. As one of the fathers of the school of furiously iconoclastic humor that continues to dominate American comedy, and as a screenwriter and playwright, he was also a creator of such Artifacts.

George (whose family name rhymes with "grow") was a child both of the Wasp ascendancy, then on the cusp of its decline, and of the mass media, print division, then at its apex. These two aspects of his background contributed mightily to his work, both in its subject matter and in what he has described as its "feelings--or qualities" of "entitlement on the one hand and feverishness on the other." His great-great-grandfather John Fowler Trow was a prominent New York printer, whose Trow City Directory was the precursor of the telephone book; his father, George Swift Trow, was the night city editor of the Post, though the family's style, unlike the tabloid's, was that of the brownstone elite. At Exeter, George learned to defend himself (and his friends, such as Bobby Wagner, the son of the mayor of New York) with a wit that could approach lethality when fully deployed. At Harvard, he wrote the 1964 "Hasty Pudding Show" (with his friend Timothy Mayer) and was president of the Lampoon, the clubby humor magazine housed in a comic castle built by William Randolph Hearst, class of 1885.

In 1966, after a stint on active duty in the Coast Guard, George joined The New Yorker. His impact on the magazine was as noticeable as it was, at first, anonymous. His unsigned Talk of the Town stories--chronicling popular music, the remnants of Edith Wharton-era "society," Harlem flash, and the new culture of marketing and strobelike celebrity--broke the mold of fusty "visits" and facty catalogues. The pieces were jazzy, telegraphic, emphatic. They, and he, inspired a cohort of young colleagues, among them Anthony Hiss, Jacob Brackman, Mark Singer, Alec Wilkinson, Veronica Geng, Alison Rose, and, especially, Ian Frazier and Jamaica Kincaid. "All sentences, all paragraphs about this part of my life, my life as a writer, must begin with George Trow" is how Kincaid begins the introduction to a collection of her own Talk stories. Having been doted on in childhood by female relatives, whose voices he often channelled in conversation, George formed strong friendships with women who had what he called "interesting syntax," including, besides Kincaid, Geng, and Rose, Jacqueline Onassis and Diana Vreeland, the editor of Vogue.

In 1970, George helped found the National Lampoon. Though he kept his New Yorker job, he was nearly as important to the new magazine's early success as were his college chums Henry Beard and Douglas Kenney and his screenwriting partner Michael O'Donoghue. NatLamp begat "Animal House" and its many successor films, and "Saturday Night Live" and its many offspring, but ...