A fascinating, opinionated portrait of journalism and the people who make it, told through pieces collected from the incomparable six-decade career of bestselling author and beloved New Yorker writer Calvin Trillin

I’ve been writing about the press almost as long as I’ve been in the game. At some point, it occurred to me that disparate pieces from various places in various styles amounted to a picture from multiple angles of what the press has been like over the years since I became a practitioner and an observer.

Calvin Trillin has reported serious pieces across America for The New Yorker, covered the Civil Rights movement in the South for Time, and written comic verse in The Nation. In all these forms, one of his favorite subjects over the years—a superb fit for Trillin’s unique combination of reportage and humor —has been his own professional environment: the American press.

In The Lede, Trillin gathers his incisive, often hilarious writing on reporting, reporters, and the media world that is their orbit. He writes about a legendary crime reporter in Miami and about a swashbuckling New York Times reporter and about an erudite film critic in Dallas who once a week transformed himself from an appreciator of the French nouvelle vague to a teenage connoisseur of movies like Mother Riley Meets the Vampire. Plus pieces on the House of Lords dreams of a North American press baron, the paucity of gossip columns in Russia, the embroilment of a weekly newspaper in a missing person case, and the founding of a publication called Beautiful Spot: A Magazine of Parking.

Uniting all of this is Trillin’s signature combination of empathy, humor, and graceful prose. The Lede is an invaluable portrait of one our fundamental American institutions from a master journalist.