Trifles Make Perfection

A Moravian by birth, a musician by avocation, a writer by choice, and a bon vivant by instinct, Wechsberg was set squarely among a generation of mid-century writers that included A. J. Liebling, M. F. K. Fisher, Waverly Root, and Ludwig Bemelmans. Many of them found a home at the New Yorker and were routinely provided carte blanche to tackle any subject they found interesting. For Wechsberg, this meant the cultural life of the civilized world, which included music, food (especially classic French food, as prepared by such great chefs as Henri Soul and Fernand Point), travel, and the history of banking and finance. Always central to these essays were people of acknowledged accomplishments, whose lives he tried to understand both in the contexts of their own personality and of the cultures that shaped them.