In her piece "The Shit-Kickers of Madison Avenue," Lillian Ross painted a vivid picture of New York's private school teens while reflecting on her own career. This influential work for The New Yorker marked a celebration of the magazine's seventieth anniversary in February 1995. Through her keen observations and light-hearted narrative style, Ross beautifully illustrated the essence of teenage life, encapsulating the blend of innocence and drama. Her deep curiosity for youth culture, along with her own experiences as a writer, culminated in a timeless classic that resonates even today.
Ross was fifty years into her career at The New Yorker, where she'd helped perfect the form of the Talk of the Town piece, with its cool, friendly eye and its limber, syncopated rhythms.
I was immediately fond of them, in their honesty and in their straightforwardness. I was deeply touched by the way they accepted me, strangely enough, as one of them.
Ross, a longtime Upper East Sider, had noticed the daily flight path of private-school kids-Nightingale girls, Buckley boys-along the west side of Madison (the 'cool' side).
The resulting story, "The Shit-Kickers of Madison Avenue," appeared in the magazine's seventieth-anniversary issue, in February, 1995. It runs sixteen hundred words long.
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