For my fellow wretches, an excerpt from Calvin Trlllin’s most recent collection of his writing, “The Lede”:
![](http://www.timporter.com/seconddraft/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/Thurber-256x300.jpg)
It is said that when James Thurber, as a young newspaper reporter, was told by an editor that his story’s first paragraph, what newspaper people refer to as the lede, suffered from wordiness, he handed in a rewrite whose opening paragraph was, in its entirety, “Dead.”
There followed a second paragraph: “That’s what the man was when they found him with a knife in his back at 4 p.m. in front of Riley’s saloon at the corner of 52nd and 12th streets.”