Kevin Drum poses a question of vital importance. To start with, he quotes the following passage from Herman Wouk’s 1950s novel Youngblood Hawke:

Soon the lawyer sat in the living room in his shirtsleeves at Jeanne’s insistence, his tie off, eating tacos from a tray. He needed a shave, and his hair was unkempt. Hawke noticed that the bristles on his face were reddish rather than blond. He looked more tired than Hawke had ever seen him, but the food and the beer brought him to quickly. “Why, these things are marvellous! What do you call them, Jeanne, tacos? I’ve never eaten anything like this. Delicious! Is there a restaurant in town where I can order these?”
She said, pleased, “Well, if you can find a lowbrow enough Mexican joint they’ll probably have tacos, but I wouldn’t endorse the contents, Gus. Better ask me, when you feel like having them again. They’re easy to make.”

Kevin, a Californian to the core, then asks: “Really? In New York City, circa 1952, tacos were so uncommon as to be practically unknown? Who knew?”

I’m far too young to have any real insights into this question, but I immediately thought of the Complete New Yorker. The results turned out to be pretty interesting. According to the CNY, the earliest mention of the word “taco” was in 1974. There are actually two hits from 1974. In the later of the two, a cartoon by Barney Tobey (July 15, 1974), the gag turns on the “exotic” nature of the taco, although the context implies that the term was at least somewhat known to New Yorker readers.

More interesting is the first hit, two months earlier (May 13, 1974). It’s a TOTT by Anthony Hiss about something called the “Taco Trolley.” The first paragraph supplies the telltale tone:

The taco is a tasty, crispy tortilla filled with beef, lettuce, shredded cheese, and special sauce. It is a wildly popular fast-food item in California and places like that. In fact, the taco is one of the reasons people visit California.

Ha! I love it—”places like that.” Difficult to see anyone getting away with that today. And that dryly dismissive third sentence seems a precursor to Woody Allen’s joke from Annie Hall that “the only cultural advantage” that Los Angeles can claim is that “you can make a right turn on a red light.”

I think it’s safe to assume that, July cartoon or no July cartoon, the New Yorker editors thought it wiser to explain exactly what a taco is and where it comes from. So it wasn’t exactly everyday lingo.

(The comment thread to Kevin’s post is fascinating, constituting a kind of thumbnail cultural history of the taco in the United States. It’s truly the blogosphere at its finest. My findings here merely confirm the observations of many of the commenters there.)
—Martin Schneider

I propose a new category: works of fiction that originally appeared in The New Yorker that later took on a life of their own apart from the magazine. Criteria for inclusion in the group would include authentic fame, to the point that people uninterested in or unacquainted with the magazine would still have heard of it or might have some well-defined attitude towards it. Revelation that the item originally appeared in The New Yorker might come as a mild surprise.
A relevant anecdote: when I was in college (this was in about 1990), I was chatting with a friend of mine, a decidedly unliterary type, a poli-sci major who later went into finance. He was telling me about this great sci-fi story he had once read, about this contraption that could insert people into novels. About halfway through his account, my face took on a look of bemused recognition. Once he was done, I said, “You know who wrote that story? Woody Allen.” I can still hear his delighted hoot of astonishment in my mind.
This sort of thing represents a tremendous accomplishment for a work of fiction, I think. Indeed, it’s arguably close to the highest “social” accomplishment that a work of fiction can attain, that it nevertheless affects people who don’t even care about books that much. You can be sure that you’ve entered the social network at large when your song is converted into Muzak form for consumption in supermarkets, you know?
For the same reason, I think the list of such works is very, very short. There’s a danger here of “merely” listing very often anthologized works, but suffice to say there’ll be some overlap. The two criteria, “taking on a life of its own” and “people would be surprised by New Yorker origins,” are not at all the same thing, so some may qualify on one but not the other.
Here’s my list in progress, in chronological order:
James Thurber, “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty,” March 18, 1939
James Thurber, “The Catbird Seat,” November 14, 1942
J.D. Salinger, “A Perfect Day for Bananafish,” January 31, 1948
Shirley Jackson, “The Lottery,” June 26, 1948
John Updike, “A&P,” July 22, 1961
Woody Allen, “The Kugelmass Episode,” May 2, 1977
Philip Roth, “The Ghost Writer,” June 25, 1979
Raymond Carver, “Where I’m Calling From,” July 19, 1982
Annie Proulx, “Brokeback Mountain,” October 13, 1997
Almost all of Salinger’s stories have become part of the culture at large, even as any informed reader knows where they first appeared. Updike’s story is much anthologized, but I don’t know how much ordinary readers care about it—I think it’s a legitimate criticism of Updike’s outsize reputation (obviously quite deserved) that he has never created a fictional character with half the popular currency of, say, Portnoy. (Rabbit? Maybe. But Rabbit is not a creature of The New Yorker, alas.)
Can you think of any others? I can’t, but I’m sure there are plenty of good candidates I haven’t listed so far. Did any of Nabokov’s stories acquire its own fame at large? Irwin Shaw? John Cheever? John O’Hara? What stories have taken flight, like Charlotte’s baby spiders, far away from The New Yorker?
—Martin Schneider