A large part of all early contributions to The New Yorker arrived uninvited and unexpected. They arrived in the mail or under the arm of people who walked in with them. … For a number of years, The New Yorker published an average of fifty new writers a year. Magazines that refuse unsolicited manuscripts strike me as lazy, incurious, self-assured, and self-important. I’m speaking of magazines of general circulation. … [I]f I were a publisher, I wouldn’t want to put out a magazine that failed to examine everything that turned up.

—EB White