Genius in Disguise: Harold Ross of the New Yorker

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"Magazines are about eighty-five percent luck," Harold Ross told George Jean Nathan. "I was about the luckiest son of a bitch alive when I started The New Yorker." Ross was certainly lucky back in 1925, but he was smart, too. When such unknown young talents as E. B. White, James Thurber, Janet Flanner, Helen Hokinson, Wolcott Gibbs, and Peter Arno turned up on his doorstep, he knew exactly what to do with them. So was born what many people consider the most urbane and groundbreaking magazine in history. Thomas ...
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Genius in Disguise: Harold Ross of The New Yorker

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Overview

"Magazines are about eighty-five percent luck," Harold Ross told George Jean Nathan. "I was about the luckiest son of a bitch alive when I started The New Yorker." Ross was certainly lucky back in 1925, but he was smart, too. When such unknown young talents as E. B. White, James Thurber, Janet Flanner, Helen Hokinson, Wolcott Gibbs, and Peter Arno turned up on his doorstep, he knew exactly what to do with them. So was born what many people consider the most urbane and groundbreaking magazine in history. Thomas Kunkel has written the first comprehensive biography of Harold W. Ross, the high school dropout and Colorado miner's son who somehow blew out of the West to become a seminal figure in American journalism and letters, and a man whose story is as improbable as it is entertaining. The author follows Ross from his trainhopping start as an itinerant newspaperman to his editorship of The Stars and Stripes, to his role in the formation of the Algonquin Round Table, to his audacious and near-disastrous launch of The New Yorker. For nearly twenty-seven years Ross ran the magazine with a firm hand and a sensitivity that his gruff exterior belied. Whether sharpshooting a short story, lecturing Henry Luce, dining with the Duke of Windsor, or playing stud poker with one-armed railroad men in Reno, Nevada, he revealed an irrepressible spirit, an insatiable curiosity, and a bristling intellect - qualities that, not coincidentally, characterized The New Yorker. Ross demanded excellence, venerated talent, and shepherded his contributors with a curmudgeonly pose and an infectious sense of humor. "l am not God," he once informed E. B. White. "The realization of this came slowly and hard some years ago, but l have swallowed it by now. l am merely an angel in the Lord's vineyard." Through the years many have wondered how this unlikely character could ever have conceived such a sophisticated enterprise as The New Yorker. But after reading this rich, enchanting, impeccably rese

This hugely entertaining biography of the founding editor of The New Yorker tells the diverting story of how Ross and the brilliant group of people he gathered around him--including James Thurber, Charles Addams, Dorothy Parker, and John O'Hara--devised the formula that made the magazine such a popular and critical success. Photos & cartoons.

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Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly
This marvelous, gossipy biography of Harold Ross (1892-1951), the Colorado silver prospector's son who founded the New Yorker in 1925 and made it into a bastion of literary excellence and East Coast urbanity, is as much a portrait of the man as a revealing chronicle of the magazine. Ross dropped out of high school in Salt Lake City to become an itinerant newspaper reporter. As a WWI private, he went AWOL in France and trekked to Paris, where he edited the U.S. Army's weekly newspaper Stars and Stripes. Kunkel, a former reporter for the Miami Herald and the New York Times, lays to rest the lingering legend of Ross as a perpetually confused hayseed who succeeded by dumb luck. We meet a man of glaring contradictions-profane and puritanical, a conservative presiding over a decidedly liberal magazine-whose keen intellect and searching curiosity nurtured such talents as E.B. White, Janet Flanner, John Cheever, Dorothy Parker, John O'Hara and James Thurber. Kunkel illuminates Ross's three failed marriages, his clashes with his protg and successor William Shawn, and his bitter feud with his partner, yeast magnate Raoul Fleischmann. Illustrations not seen by PW. (Mar.)
Library Journal
In the task of writing this biography and arriving at a just estimate of the founder of The New Yorker, Kunkel had two things in his favor-the first that he is a practiced journalist and the second that he had at his disposal an extensive body of literature upon which to call and dozens of people he could interview. This book brings the reader closer to Ross the man than anything that has heretofore appeared. Kunkel does not pretend that this "frontier lad with a tenth-grade education" was a great man or original thinker. He presents him as a complex, controversial person who happened to have a reverence for the written word and a genius for finding writing talent. The book will give pleasure to all intelligent readers whether or not they know Ross or are fans of The New Yorker.-A.J. Anderson, GSLIS, Simmons Coll., Boston
Donna Seaman
How did a tall, gangly, gat-toothed fellow from Colorado become the founding editor of the New Yorker, the nation's most urbane literary magazine? It took some doing and therein lies an irresistible and multifaceted story, one that Kunkel tells with flair. He traces Harold Ross' meandering path from Aspen, Colorado, to many points west and south and on to France during the first World War. Ross' work on the fledgling Stars and Stripes positioned him for his bold entry into New York publishing, but getting the New Yorker off the ground was as much the result of serendipity as of vision and hard work. There's no separating Ross from his magazine, so Kunkel's biography is by necessity also an analysis of Ross' innovations in magazine publishing. Kunkel describes Ross' acrimonious relationship with his patient business partner, Raoul Fleischmann, and positively revels in stories about Ross' fortuitous recruiting of such dynamic talents as Katherine Angell, E. B. White, James Thurber, Janet Flanner, and many other stellar writers. As Kunkel astutely chronicles the evolution of the New Yorker, he relates dozens of anecdotes about the incomparable Ross who was, by turns, curmudgeonly, curious, assiduous, prankish, profane, uncompromising, generous, and brilliant.
From Barnes & Noble
This story of a high school dropout who became a seminal figure in American letters follows Ross's career from newspaperman to editor of The Stars & Stripes, to the Algonquin Round Table, to his audacious launch of The New Yorker.
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Product Details

  • ISBN-13: 9780679418375
  • Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
  • Publication date: 3/7/1995
  • Edition description: 1st ed
  • Edition number: 1
  • Pages: 497
  • Product dimensions: 6.66 (w) x 9.58 (h) x 1.60 (d)

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