Graydon Carter shares his six favorite books
Ever wonder what your favorite celebrities are reading — whether it’s a timeless classic or the buzzy bestseller they can’t put down? Welcome to Page-Turners, where stars reveal the books that keep them hooked, inspired and up all night. Warning: your TBR pile is about to get a lot longer.
Former Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter loves reading a good mystery or nonfiction book.
“I read one or two mysteries a week these days,” Carter told Page Six, adding that he intersperses them with nonfiction reads that are “largely set in the middle part of the last century — a period I gravitate to in terms of not only books, but cars, films, music, art, furniture, and clothing.”
He explained, “I’m especially drawn to memoirs. Or anything about New York during this period.”
Carter’s own bestselling memoir, “When the Going Was Good,” came out in March 2025 and details his two and a half decades running the iconic magazine.
See below for Carter’s must-read book recommendations.
“This is Ben Hecht’s bravura performance of a memoir, as outsized and restless as its author. It’s a book that careers through journalism, Hollywood, and Broadway, with the energy of a man of Promethean talents who seemed to live three lives simultaneously.”
“Norman Lewis’ diary of the Allied occupation of Naples at the end of World War II captures the chaos, hunger, and moral wreckage of postwar Italy with the cool, precise eye of a born observer. It’s a masterpiece of understated witness.”
“David Niven’s irresistibly charming memoir moves from his hardscrabble British childhood to Hollywood stardom with the effortless wit and self-deprecating grace that made him one of the most beloved actors of his generation.”
“Originally written for Esquire, Michael Herr’s ‘Dispatches’ is inarguably the most electrifying piece of writing to emerge from the Vietnam War, Herr abandoned the conventions of journalism entirely in favor of a fragmented, hallucinatory prose style that perfectly mirrors the chaos and unreality of the war itself.”
“Dan Okrent’s masterly work of narrative history tells the improbable story of the building of Rockefeller Center—one of the great urban cities within a city. His monumental saga recounts ambition on an epic scale, and the Depression-era obstacles that almost confounded the Rockefeller visionaries who planned, financed, and built it.”
“Jan Morris’s affectionate and evocative portrait of New York is set at the end of the Second World War, when the city stood at the absolute pinnacle of its global, cultural, and economic powers. In her lyrical, mischievous, and quietly elegiac style, Morris captures the sheer humming optimism during that fleeting moment when anything in New York seemed possible.”
