George William Swift Trow, Jr. (September 28, 1943 – November 24, 2006) was an American essayist, novelist, playwright, and media critic. He worked for The New Yorker for almost 30 years, and wrote numerous essays and several books. He is best known for his long essay on television and its effect on American culture, "Within the Context of No Context," first published in The New Yorker on November 17, 1980 (and later published as a book), one of the few times the magazine devoted its central section to a single piece of writing. Life and career Trow was born into an upper-middle-class family in Greenwich, Connecticut, the son of Anne (née Carter; 1918–2010) and George William Swift Trow (1916–1997). His father was a newspaperman. His great-great paternal grandfather, John Fowler Trow (1810–1886), was a New York-based publisher who is known today as the namesake of New York City directories. Trow studied at Phillips Exeter Academy, and graduated from Harvard University in 1965. There, he was president of The Harvard Lampoon. He later served as an editor for its offshoot, the National Lampoon, working with young humorists like Michael O'Donoghue, Henry Beard, and Douglas Kenney. He served on active duty in the U.S. Coast Guard. In 1966, Trow took a position at The New Yorker, writing articles for the magazine, especially in the section "The Talk of the Town," and contributing short fiction. He worked under editors William Shawn (1951–1987) and Robert Gottlieb (1987–1992), whom he saw as mentors. In 1994, when new editor Tina Brown invited Roseanne Barr to oversee a special issue on women, Trow quit the magazine in protest. He abandoned the house he was building in Germantown, New York, and traveled around North America, living in Texas, Alaska, and Newfoundland. Several years before his death, he moved to Naples, Italy. In 2006 he died there, alone, having secluded himself for a decade. Trow was socially ambitious: throughout his life, he was "striving to be part of the '10 percent of people at Harvard who wear tuxedos to their own little events in their own little buildings and you can see them out on their balconies with their tuxedos and their often very beautiful girls who are also similarly there from the Vanderbilts and the Astors.'" Writing Throughout his career, Trow analyzed mainstream American cultural institutions to understand how the culture had changed from the newspaper-reading, eastern Establishment-dominated