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Killed

Great Journalism Too Hot to Print



David Wallis
June 2004     ISBN: 1560255811

Killed resurrects remarkable articles that publications like Harper's, Vanity Fair and The New Yorker assigned to renowned writers, then discarded--not for reasons of quality but because of their potential for unwanted controversy. Skittish editors feared that publishing these provocative pieces about politics, sex, corruption and culture might upset their pals, enrage readers or offend advertisers. This groundbreaking collection includes contributions by George Orwell, Betty Friedan, Terry Southern, P.J. O'Rourke, Mike Sager, Ann Louise Bardach, Jon Entine, Ted Rall, Douglas Rushkoff, Robert Fisk and Carlo Wolff.

Killed pries open the inner sanctum of the editor's office to give readers a rare glimpse at the sometimes sordid business that goes on within. Here, for the first time, you can read Betty Friedan's powerful essay imploring young women to take college seriously; in 1958 this article so unnerved the man who ran McCall's that he refused to run the revolutionary work, inspiring Friedan to later write The Feminine Mystique. Among the other important stories finally brought to light in these pages: Larry Doyle's scathing satire of control-freak Hollywood publicists that struck too close to home for editors at US; Mike Sager's gripping account of life in a squalid Palestinian refugee camp that the Washington Post Magazine inexplicably spiked; Jon Entine's devastating investigation of the Body Shop's deceptive marketing practices that Vanity Fair kept you from reading--until now.

Killed uncovers evidence of pandemic self-censorship in the magazine and newspaper industries at a time when the breakneck pace of media consolidation has gobbled up countless independent publishers, raising the stakes for contrarian writers and independent-minded readers alike.

What readers are saying

"The suffocated stories in Killed--along with the obituary notes explaining each story's untimely demise--constitute a hidden history of modern American magazine journalism. Their resurrection is a public service and a work of art."

--Joe Conason, author of Big Lies: The Right-Wing Propaganda Machine and How It Distorts the Truth

"This book is fun to read, but it's also a wakeup call: we need tougher writers and less arrogant bosses."

--Andrei Condrescu, author of Wakefield

About the Authors

David Wallis is a journalist and founder of Featurewell.com, a syndicate that markets articles by more than 1,000 top journalists. He has written for the New Yorker, Wired, The Observer (London), the Washington Post and the New York Times Magazine among others. David Wallis lives in New York City.



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