When the Going Was Good: An Editor's Adventures During the Last Golden Age of Magazines

The title of Graydon Carter’s memoir, When the Going Was Good, establishes Carter’s work to use his life story as a throughway to tracing print journalism’s evolution from the analogue through the digital era. Carter has a personal interest in conveying these industry shifts, as he has worked in the publishing and editorial world since he was in his early twenties. Throughout the memoir, Carter employs a narrative style in depicting his vocational mishaps, meanderings, and discoveries to render the often obscure journalism world accessible to a wide range of readers. His anecdotal accounts of his experiences—spanning from The Canadian Review to Time to Life to The Observer to Spy to Vanity Fair and finally to Air Mail—offer an in-depth, poignant human take on how the journalism world has changed as a result of technological advancement.

Carter employs a humble, self-deprecating tone in order to capture his novice status when he first entered the publishing industry. By casting himself as an inexperienced but curious individual, Carter conveys how much he had to learn in order to make sense of the print journalism world from The Canadian Review on.