From “The Letter,” Elon Green’s smart Awl reconsideration of the Robert Gottlieb era at the New Yorker, which began with a staff protest and ended with his firing five years later:

“Gottlieb’s appointment enraged the staff, who were again not asked for their approval. It didn’t much matter that Gottlieb’s publishing career was the stuff of well-deserved legend; he’d edited Joseph Heller, Michael Crichton, Robert Caro, John Gardner, and so on. The reaction was, well, fairly New Yorker-ish. A very proper letter (‘scrutinized and corrected by the magazine’s fact checkers and proofreaders,’ wrote the Times) was sent to Gottlieb, beseeching him to decline the job. Containing four pages of signatures, the letter made clear that the staff’s anger was not so much with Gottlieb himself (‘Many of us know you personally and professionally, and admire your splendid record at Knopf’) as the ‘sadness and outrage over the manner in which a new editor has been imposed upon us.’ Many staffers wrote to the new boss (‘sort of off the record,’ as a former editor put it) and explained that to him.

This was not the act of a fringe contingent. The letter—which, until now, has never been published in its entirety—is signed by 154 staffers, including J.D. Salinger, Calvin Trillin, John McPhee, Jamaica Kincaid, Saul Steinberg and Janet Malcolm.” (Thanks Browser.)