The Whiting Foundation was created by Flora Ettlinger Whiting, a New York investor, collector, and philanthropist with a lifelong commitment to culture.
She was a founding member of the Friends of the American Wing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and a member of the board of the magazine company Crowell-Collier, which published authors such as F. Scott Fitzgerald, Martha Gellhorn, H. L. Mencken, and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.
Mrs. Whiting was known for her keen eye in matters aesthetic and financial. Speaking of her pioneering appreciation for American decorative art, the New York Times praised her as "a great collector." As one peer noted with envy, "She would always spot the best thing in a shop instantly." The distinctive works she assembled were later donated to or otherwise acquired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of the City of New York, and the Yale University Art Gallery. In business, her carefully selected investments were equally discerning: impressed by the work of Thomas Watson, she was an early investor in the company that later became IBM. Ultimately, her adroit money management allowed her to endow the Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation with $10 million on her death in 1971.
The Foundation endeavors to honor Mrs. Whiting's astute judgment and her love of the arts and humanities in all our grantmaking. We believe in identifying and empowering talented people at just the right moment in their creative and intellectual development to leverage our resources and provide far-reaching benefits for our society. Our first program was the Whiting Dissertation Fellowship. Between 1973 and 2015, these grants enabled thousands of promising early-career humanities scholars to work undistractedly on completing their dissertations. In 1985, the Foundation launched another major program, the Whiting Awards, to provide a similar service to writers. This $50,000 award is given annually to ten emerging authors of fiction, non-fiction, poetry, and drama with the aim of allowing them to devote themselves fully to writing for a year.
Throughout the Foundation's history, we have developed new programs and refined existing ones to serve the humanities and literature as effectively as possible. We continue to evolve as grantmakers through the twenty-first century, extending Flora Whiting's founding commitments in a time of significant change for the structures that have traditionally supported writers and humanists.
Most recently, on the literary side, the Foundation started the Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant in 2016 to foster ambitious, deeply researched works in progress, empowering authors to reach the highest possible standard of craft and insight. And in 2017, the Whiting Literary Magazines Prizes were created to acknowledge, reward, and encourage the publications that play a crucial role in championing extraordinary writers and writing.
On the humanities side, from 2015 to 2023, the Whiting Public Engagement Programs provided fellowships and seed grants to bring the fruits of scholarship to a wider public through collaborations with communities. In 2016, we launched a portfolio of grants to empower the stewards of endangered cultural heritage in less-well-resourced parts of the world. And since 2021, we have maintained a modest funding line to foster deep engagement with rich works of history, philosophy, literature, and the arts at the high-school level.
