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In 1974, a staffer at The New Yorker whom I'd met once called to say that the magazine's editor, William Shawn, wanted to see me. This was unexpected. I was twenty-three, living in Connecticut, working for another publication. I'd grown up in a family that nobody would've described as bookish, and I'd been reading The New Yorker for months, not years. On the train to Grand Central, I crammed James Thurber's "The Years with Ross," unable to fathom why I'd been brought in. Mr. Shawn, it turned out, had liked a lengthy Norman Mailer parody that I'd inserted into my college thesis, to pad it out; I'd shared it with someone who'd shared it with Shawn. He offered me a job as a Talk of the Town reporter. Afterward, panic leached into my elation. Hadn't Mr. Shawn considered that an aptitude for parody might indicate (as I knew to be the case) that I lacked a voice of my own?

My new office was on the same floor as the magazine's archive, and I was encouraged to graze among black binders containing the work of staff writers. I blissfully plodded through the collections of deceased greats, along with the work of many writers still in, or not far past, their primes. Among the latter was John Bainbridge, an author of deadpan, droll Profiles and reported pieces. A self-effacing Midwesterner turned Anglophile, he had recently expatriated to Bath, England. One of his masterly, unshowy gems was "Toots's World," a 1950 Profile of Toots Shor, a gregarious and bibulous saloonkeeper and restaurateur whose circle of pals included Joe DiMaggio, Frank Sinatra, Chief Justice Earl Warren, and a multitude of loyal patrons (a.k.a. "crumb bums") unbothered by Shor's liberally dispensed insults. Bainbridge, an assiduous listener who, according to his editor Gardner Botsford, "could get the Sphinx to talk," had a pitch-perfect ear for dialogue: "Drinkin' -- that's my way of prayin' "; "You know what a senator is to me? A guy who makes a hundred fifty bucks a week."

A decade later, the magazine published a series of articles that became "The Super-Americans," Bainbridge's best-known book, which Botsford described as a "reduction of the entire state of Texas into one elegant, funny, perceptive volume." Bainbridge had uprooted his family and moved to Texas for nearly a year, and he came to believe that the condescension with which many Americans regard Texans was a form of self-loathing: "The faults of Texas, as they are recorded by most visitors, are scarcely unfamiliar, for they are the same ones that Europeans have been taxing us with for some three hundred years: boastfulness, cultural underdevelopment, materialism, and all the rest. In enough ways to make it interesting, Texas is a mirror in which Americans are themselves reflected, not life-sized but, as in a distorting mirror, bigger than life."

With wry, anthropological detachment, Bainbridge focussed on the excesses of the Super-American archetype -- his now quaint shorthand was "millionaires" -- who believed in unfettered capitalism, racial segregation, material ostentation, minimal taxation, and male entitlement, and who had an aggressive intolerance for any federal encroachments upon their state. (He quotes from the Dallas News: "Texas is a country in itself. It started out that way, and, in resources, tastes, spirit, and aspiration, it is a land apart.") Though "The Super-Americans" had a wide readership, I felt that I was a member of its target audience. Having grown up in Oklahoma, a state dominated by the petroleum industry and infected with a boosterism that was basically Texas wannabe-ism, I knew too well the attitudes that Bainbridge anatomized.

In 1982, I sent Bainbridge a fan letter, and I received a warm reply. Five years later, while reporting in England, I spent a congenial afternoon with him. Among the topics we discussed was how I had by then uprooted my own family and repatriated to Oklahoma, for a year and a half, to report and write my first book (about the failure of a small bank, which helped trigger the bust of an oil-and-gas boom). John and I never saw each other again, but we corresponded occasionally; when he died, in 1992, I wrote his obituary for the magazine, our shared home. It felt like the least I could do. ♦