 What best summarizes what the author has to say about William Shawn?
At the table are Gill; William Shawn, then editor of The New Yorker ; and the reclusive English writer Henry Green. Shawn--"with his usual hushed delicacy of speech and manner"--inquires of the novelist whether he could possibly reveal what prompted the creation of such an exquisite work. " This was not the explanation Shawn was expecting, Gill tells us. This was, after all, a man renowned for his retiring propriety, a man who sedulously barred anything smacking of the salacious--from lingerie ads to four-letter words--from the magazine he stewarded from 1952 until 1987, five years before his death. But after reading these two new memoirs about Shawn, I wonder. "He longed for the earthiest and wildest kinds of sexual adventures," Lillian Ross discloses in hers, adding that he lusted after Hannah Arendt, Evonne Goolagong, and Madonna. Both these memoirs must be read by everyone--everyone, that is, who takes seriously the important business of sorting out precisely how he or she feels about The New Yorker , then and now. This may seem odd, for Mehta is reputed to be a very dull writer whereas Ross is a famously zippy one. Moreover, Mehta writes as Shawn's adoring acolyte, whereas Ross writes as his longtime adulterous lover. Just knowing that Mrs. Shawn is still alive adds a certain tension to reading much of what this Other Woman chooses to divulge. Shawn was managing editor of The New Yorker when he hired Ross in 1945 as the magazine's second woman reporter (the first was Andy Logan).
 He was a respectable man with complexities that weren't always obvious and is hard to pin down based on the stories told of him.
 He had a magnetic personality, as shown in the way Ross and Mehta gravitated towards him.  While quiet on the outside, he was a man prone to adultery.  He was a respectable man with complexities that weren't always obvious and is hard to pin down based on the stories told of him.  He lived a simple life and worked hard to publish his magazine.