#e. mcnerney

Joan Crawford was an MGM star by the 1930s, and according to many critics, an absolute scene-stealer in 1932’s Grand Hotel. However, the New Yorker’s film critic John Mosher saw Garbo, and only Garbo, in this Academy Award-winning pre-code drama. April 23, 1932 cover by E.B. White. Although White’s friend and early office mate James Thurber had been contributing drawings for more than a year, it…

I wonder what the French or the British thought when, in 1929 — just a little over a decade after the Great War — their former enemies were able to fly a 56-ton aircraft, carrying 169 passengers, into the skies above Switzerland.

Sept. 12, 1931 cover by Helen Hokinson.

And I wonder what some Americans thought in 1931 when this same aircraft toured Europe and Africa before breezing across the…