When the pandemic began, I dove into this magazine’s archives, desperate to see what my predecessors were publishing in the throes of the Spanish flu outbreak a century earlier. Unfortunately, every author in the volumes I found seems to write merrily about everything under the sun except a deadly global pandemic.
I did find, however, Hazel Miller’s wickedly delicious piece on “What Editors Do” from the June 1920 issue. (“An editor, according to popular conception, is a person, male or female, who wields a wicked blue pencil, indulges in delightful tête-à-têtes with successful authors, and draws a fabulous salary for being a thorough-going tyrant and autocrat.”) She, too, doesn’t mention the outbreak, but she does reference another deadly global event that caught my eye: The first World War and its…
