George William Swift Trow Jr. (September 28, 1943 – November 24, 2006) was an American essayist, novelist, playwright, and media critic.
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.
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.
In 1994, when new editor Tina Brown invited Roseanne Barr to oversee a special issue on women, Trow quit the magazine in protest.
"Middle-distance" institutions that had long given Americans' lives real contexts (such as fraternal organizations, bowling leagues, and women's clubs), had disappeared as people stayed home to watch television.
"[9] "No Context" ends with a narrative memoir of Trow's experiences working two summers as a guide at the 1964 New York World's Fair.
The Black Rock Forest, 50 miles north of New York City along the Hudson River, had been donated to Harvard as a nature preserve for scientific studies.
Trow writes about the Harvard administration's indifference to the property except as a profit opportunity, and its eventual rescue and dedication to educational nature studies.
Trow "swirls" between pop and mainstream cultural icons, such as Doris Day, Alfred Hitchcock, Elvis Presley, and Dwight D. Eisenhower.
Trow asserts that the models of masculine adulthood presented to his generation by the official mass culture were so out of date or irrelevant that being in/on/with television (and adopting an ironic attitude to one's self) was the only possible choice.
The book, which moves from the mid-19th century to the present, tracks the energy in three intertwined families, from the masculine vitality of a thuggish Irish immigrant to the weak flame of his elderly bachelor grandson, who lives on his income in two rooms in New York City, and spends his time caring for his clothes and going out into what remains of Society.