Willing Davidson
Senior editor and director of audio

When Peter Hessler was a boy, in Columbia, Missouri—before he lived in rural China, before he became a celebrated foreign correspondent in Beijing, Chengdu, and Cairo, before he won a MacArthur “genius” grant for his plain-spoken illuminations of the texture of daily life in places far outside The New Yorker’s usual orbit—he delivered newspapers. It was the perfect job for him. He was nine years old, and he liked waking up early. He liked the repetition, and the smell of newspapers, and the feeling of being out in the world before dawn, when almost no one was around. He liked money, too. Some customers could be quite generous. Mr. Wood, a respected city clerk who signed the notices that appeared in the papers that Hessler was delivering, was often out walking his dog in the early mornings. He would give Hessler a quarter. At some point, he started putting the quarters into Hessler’s pocket himself.

I have been Hessler’s editor for sixteen years, yet I have never lost the quiet thrill that comes over me when an e-mail arrives with a first draft attached. Often these drafts come on no strict timetable, after some effort on my part to ask him what, exactly, the piece will be “about.” In this case, more than a year ago, he simply told me that he wanted to write a Personal History about delivering newspapers and about a crime that had been committed during his boyhood. Frankly, it didn’t sound like earth-shaking material. Still, I knew that Hessler’s special talent is to take on familiar territory and make it absolutely novel. Shortly after he and his family moved to Cairo, in 2011, at the height of the Arab Spring, he wrote a piece about the protests in Tahrir Square. He was hardly the first to do so. The small urban patch was the focus of a tremendous amount of international news coverage. Yet all that reporting was missing something. On the edge of Tahrir Square was a mosque. The mosque, Hessler wrote, was “the only institution on Tahrir that remained open to the revolution.” Spending time there over weeks, he saw people eating, sleeping, and charging their cellphones. The mosque had the only public bathrooms on the square. Witnessing the revolution from the perspective of the humans who passed through the mosque allowed Hessler to convey the ground-level workings of the Arab Spring—as well as to foreshadow the religious and class differences that would lead it to its tragic end.

The story of Mr. Wood and the boy who delivered his newspaper each day is, in its own way, a tragedy. But another hallmark of a Peter Hessler story is delight—a wry noticing of the absurd, of the ways that people try to do the right thing and, sometimes, come very close. Hessler’s remembrance of being a paperboy—that most common occupation—expands to capture the complications of American life itself.