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��Dz���’s New Yorker changed the face of contemporary fiction, perfected a new form of literary journalism �� and became synonymous with sophistication. It replaced convention with innovation.


I found this book to be an enjoyable biography of Harold Ross, the founder and long-time (in effect) editor-in-chief of The New Yorker (TNY) magazine.

Ross was born in Aspen Colorado in 1892 (a silver mining town in those days), to a Scottish-Irish immigrant father (from Ulster) and a “prairie schoolmarm�� mother of New England stock, who was born in Massachusetts and raised in McPherson Kansas.

The first part of the book (Child of the West, 1892-1924) deals with ��Dz���’s early years in Colorado, his start of wanderlust in 1910, when he boarded a train headed west to California, his beginnings of a career as a newspaper reporter, his movement from the West Coast to the East (first Georgia, then the Big City �� New York) his significant work for the Stars and Stripes, a weekly military publication begun in early 1918 for reading by the American troops in Europe. Of this latter post, Kunkel writes

More than anyone else on staff, Ross had an uncanny sense of what enlisted men would and wouldn’t read. It was the commoner’s touch, which sprang from his own background as well as his multifarious professional experience. He himself recognized this singular capability and asserted it from the beginning.

The section concludes with Ross returning to New York after the war, “the most widely known private in the American Expeditionary Forces��, and “New Yorker��, a chapter about ��Dz���’s first marriage, and the years 1923 and 1924 in which he hatched the idea for his new magazine, found funding for it, and in the fall of 1924 produced the prospectus for the magazine, reproduced in an Appendix, and called by Kunkel “the most famous magazine prospectus in history��.

The second section of the book (A Magazine of Sophistication: 1925-1938) documents the early years of The New Yorker. Tough going at first, maybe that’s typical of a start-up magazine.

The concluding section (Season in the Sun: 1939-1951) documents the years during which TNY rode into the limelight, including the war and post-war years.



Harold Ross Culver Pictures (from the book)
In this portrait from the early forties, ��Dz���’s thin smile masks the wartime stress. “The magazine is running us,�� he told Katherine White, “we aren’t running it.��

During the war, the best THY pieces, says Kunkel, “had the full-bodied, three-dimensional quality of literature, with none of the stale whiff of accounts reconstructed from military briefings.�� Included among these were John Lardner’s narrative of going ashore with the Allies at Anzio; A.J. Liebling’s “Cross-Channel Trip��, a “masterly three-part account of the invasion of Normandy��; and one of the most remarkable magazine publishing events ever, the issue of August 31, 1946, which contained a usual summer cover, some ads, the Goings On calendar �� and John Hersey’s 31,347 word “Hiroshima��.

”Hiroshima�� was a sensation. The issue sold out almost immediately, copies being scalped for fifteen and twenty dollars. Broadcasters read from it over the radio. Demand to reprint it came in from newspapers and syndicates around the world (proceeds were donated to Red Cross relief). An instant book was made and snapped up by the Book-of-the-Month Club �� Albert Einstein asked for one thousand copies of the issue.

John Hersey UPI/Bettmann (from the book)



Harold Ross died in December 1951 during an operation to remove one of his lungs. He was 59.



His magazine lives on. Now published 47 times per year, next month will be its 91st birthday. In case you wonder, I'm a big fan.




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