I and many others didn’t believe that Shawn ever wanted to pass his mantle on to Bingham, or to anyone else. As a college English major, graduate student in literature, and English teacher in prep school, I had a mind too filled with Greek and Shakespearean tragic heroes, Dickensian manipulators, and Dostoevskian monomaniacs not to see Shawn in that kind of literary light almost right from the beginning. His personality contained a combination of qualities anathematic to the graceful relinquishing of power: genius, industry, a martyr’s demeanor, and a fanaticism about the New Yorker that he proclaimed so loudly and so tiresomely that it convinced others — and maybe even himself — that actions he might be taking to preserve his own preeminence were merely actions taken to preserve the preeminence of the publication. And that he was right about this for so many years — that his own best interests and those of the magazine seemed in many crucial respects indistinguishable, because the magazine was such a great cultural and commercial success under Shawn’s rule — made it hard for others to tell when he stopped being right, or to speak up when he stopped being right, or to take measures against the time when he would stop being right.