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JANE KRAMER
Jane Kramer writes about two kinds of people: anonymous, marginal characters; and powerful
politicians and businessmen who are at the center of their world. But in both cases, Kramer’s goal is
the same: to explore the space between what’s in their heads and what they say is in their heads. “It’s
in that space—that negotiated space—that you can find the person,” she says. It is this talent for
limning a character’s inner reality, for rendering someone’s subjective perceptions as well as their
objective actions, that led Newsweek’s James N. Baker to describe Kramer as “a writer who
combines the skills of a social historian with those of a novelist.”
Kramer has split her forty years at The New Yorker between writing about America and Europe,
alternatively leaving one and reintroducing herself to the other—a dialectic that keeps her perspective
toward each fresh and open. She has had an astonishingly productive career (nine books and hundreds
of articles, essays, and reviews), all the more impressive because of the variety of subjects and
countries she writes about.
Her greatest talent is for writing concretely about enormous, abstract questions (the meaning of the
Holocaust, the future of the American West, the function of art). “Ms. Kramer’s methodology is to
start at the grass roots and work upward, musing on an intriguing personality or a quirky situation; her
generalizations fall not as sweeping declarations from the pulpit, but as astringent aphorisms, mordant
throwaway lines,” writes James M. Markham in his New York Times Book Review of Europeans
(1988).
Kramer’s favorite literary form is the profile. “I like looking at a larger story through a particular
personal lens so that I’m not simply analyzing or asking ‘Whither the world?’ I try to find the people
within the larger story. I look for marginal figures who by definition look at the world with the
skepticism of a journalist. There is something almost collegial about looking at life through the eyes
of another outsider,” she says.
Jane Kramer was born on August 7, 1938, in Providence, Rhode Island. She received a BA in
English from Vassar College in 1959, and an MA in English from Columbia University, where she
studied seventeenth-century and contemporary English and American literature. Her first journalism
experience was at The Morningsider, a free weekly run by two Columbia graduate students. This led
to a job at the recently founded Village Voice, where she wrote feature stories about such people as
Jane Jacobs and Marcel Marceau, and the life of downtown New York. These stories were collected
in her first book, Off Washington Square: A Reporter Looks at Greenwich Village, N.Y. (1963).
Her Village Voice writing caught New Yorker editor William Shawn’s eye, and she became a staff
writer in 1964. Her second book, Allen Ginsberg in America (1968), grew out of her two-part New
Yorker profile of the Beat poet. In 1969, Kramer accompanied her husband, anthropologist Vincent