Product Description

These exhilarating letters—selected and introduced by Thomas Kunkel, who wrote Genius in Disguise, the distinguished Ross biography—tell the dramatic story of the birth of The New Yorker and its precarious early days and years. Ross worries about everything from keeping track of office typewriters to the magazine's role in wartime to the exact questions to be asked for a "Talk of the Town" piece on the song "Happy Birthday." We find Ross, in Kunkel's words, "scolding Henry Luce, lecturing Orson Welles, baiting J. Edgar Hoover, inviting Noel Coward and Ginger Rogers to the circus, wheedling Ernest Hemingway— offering to sell Harpo Marx a used car and James Cagney a used tractor, and explaining to restaurateur-to-the-stars Dave Chasen, step by step, how to smoke a turkey." These letters from a supreme editor tell in his own words the story of the fierce, lively man who launched the world's most prestigious magazine.


From the Hardcover edition.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1209472 in Books
• Published on: 2001-01-23
• Released on: 2001-01-23
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 448 pages

From Amazon.com
"Don't waste your time and words on letters," Harold Ross cautioned more than one writer. "You don't get paid for them." Happily, The New Yorker's founding editor and dreamer didn't follow his own advice, and now--thanks to his biographer, Thomas Kunkel--we can share in Ross's revealing, inspiring, and hilarious correspondence. The fizzing communiqués collected in Letters from the Editor begin when he was a serviceman in France during World War I, and from the start his impulses were comedic. In April 1918, for example, a shell came a little too close for comfort: "My morale was shattered. I immediately retreated to a subway station and remained there for two hours. I then came up and consumed a whole bottle of 'morale.'"

Ross liked to present himself as an unadorned, uneducated type, but from the moment he magicked up The New Yorker in 1924, it's clear that he was far more. Nonetheless, as late as 1949 he declared, "I don't know anything I've done for the human race, except possibly entertain a minute segment of it from time to time, and I can't compare myself with Goethe, because I don't know what he did for the race, either." The above quotes should give readers some notion of Ross's zinging mode, his sentences gathering into an absurd or satirical finale. Here's another: In 1937, he told E.B. White: "A gentleman from Montreal wrote in suggesting that your last piece be set to music. I suppose you got that letter. There was some talk that I ought to write you a letter upon completion of ten years service and I started a couple of times on it, my idea being to have that set to music and sing it to you." And the paragraph only gets better from there--just take a look at page 120. In fact, Ross's dispatches to White and White's wife, New Yorker editor Katharine White, are among the book's most tantalizing as he wheedles, exclaims, scolds, and invigorates.

Ross lived for his job, and gave endless support to his writers, artists, and editors. His letters to the likes of Fitzgerald, Thurber, Rebecca West--not to mention the various Marx brothers--are graceful and unsycophantic. Yet he was no less solicitous to the obscure. In 1949 he complimented one Sally Benson on her "very good and trim story" before admonishing her: "Twenty-six stories in the next twenty-six weeks is what I expect from you, young lady, and come to think of it no more suicides during that period. Our characters have been bumping themselves off so often lately that our readers think they're reading Official Detective half the time."

Of course Letters from the Editor lets us in on far more than The New Yorker, but it is Ross's missives and memos to his staff and contributors--and several more than acrimonious shots at his publisher and advertising department--that are most intriguing. Here was an editor who was concerned with every level of the magazine: he kept a card catalog with story ideas but was equally obsessed with language, commas, typos, and even the vexed question of large or small capital letters. In this sense, Kunkel's collection is a sublime record of a lost era. Ross was a lucky visionary, after all, who never concerned himself with target audiences, focus groups, or user testing. By his own lights, he and his colleagues were not "'aware' of our readers. It's the other way around with me. All I know about getting out a magazine is to print what you think is good ... and let nature take its course: if enough readers think as you do, you're a success, if not you're a failure. I don't think it's possible to edit a magazine by 'doping out' your audience, and would never try to do that." Hmmm, could Harold Ross have something there? --Kerry Fried

From Library Journal
Kunkel (Genius in Disguise: Harold Ross of the New Yorker) here collects the letters of The New Yorker's first editor. Born in Colorado, Ross (1892-1951) became a reporter at 16, a contributor to The Stars and Stripes during World War I, and in 1925, a New Yorker editor. His entertaining and informative letters touch on both his personal life and The New Yorker's notorious problems and achievements-its economic, legal, literary, and artistic struggles; its famous writers; and a wide collection of Ross's friends and acquaintances. Throughout his writings, Ross displays loyalty, deviousness, prejudices, wisdom, humor, and charm. Wonderfully edited, these letters are a joy to read. Highly recommended for literature collections and the common reader.
Gene Shaw,
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
This editor's letters are on a par with those of Maxwell Perkins. Just as Kunkel "found" Harold Ross in the New York Public Library as he perused Ross' letters, so readers will manage to find Ross through this well-executed collection. There is Ross disarming Groucho and Harpo Marx, Ethel Barrymore, and Janet Flanner; loving, courting, and rejecting his first wife, Jane Grant; handling with a firm hand feisty John O'Hara and Herman Mankiewicz; correcting the arrogance of Truman Capote; and gently denying the racism of Dorothy Parker. He was always writing a letter to extend the reach of his magazine. Two months before his death at 59, there's a letter to Rebecca West that is a long apology for being late in responding to her concern about his illness, and it's so natural. Working was writing. Besides, his was a day of letter-writing as a part of living. As is our e-mail? Bonnie Smothers

Customer Reviews

Worth reading--because Ross is worth reading
Most of the text is Ross's; this is what makes the book worth 4 stars.

Some of the explanatory comments are pretty clumsy:

"Married to Fleischmann's ex-wife, Ruth, a major New Yorker stockholder, Vischer played a strong behind-the-scenes role at the magazine and was trying to keep Ross from quitting." (p. 271)

Would a sentence like that have ever made the pages of the New Yorker?

I can't comment on the selection of letters with any authority, but it's at least adequate: Truman Capote progresses from someone who, in September 1944, "wouldn't have been employed here [even] as [an office boy] probably, if it hadn't been for the man- and boy-power shortage" (Capote had insulted Robert Frost by walking out on poetry reading) to somone whose stories Ross would like to see more of, if they "aren't too psychopathic" in July 1949.

Alive in His Letters
These letters were my companion as I read "Genius in Disguise", Kunkel's wonderful biography of Harold Ross. The biography tells the story of Ross and his founding and development of The New Yorker. These letters bring Ross to life and convey the personality that spotted and nurtured the talent that made the magazine great. Here's a quick letter to John Cheever in 1947, which gives a little flavor of the man:

"Dear Cheever:
I've just read "The Enormous Radio," having gone away for a spell and got behind, and I send my respects and admiration. The piece is worth coming back to work for. It will turn out to be a memorable one, or I am a fish. Very wonderful, indeed."
As ever,
Ross

Am loving every page of this book
I've long been a fan of The New Yorker altho the drawings and not the too lengthy articles are my favorites now.

Have read most of the books about working at the magazine, but this is the best. Harold Ross had such a way with words. I particularly liked the letter of sympathy to E.B. White (page 97) upon death of White's father: "...after you get to be thirty people you know keep dropping off all the time and it's a hell of a note." And about Christmas: "...it always comes at the very worse moment in the year for me."

Here is truly a genius at work. I thought it was ironic also that although he said don't waste time writing letters as you don't get paid for them, he wrote them so well. It is also interesting that the editor of this book finally found some recordings that Ross made and he was dictating letters!

I recommend this book for anyone who enjoys The New Yorker and would like to know how it developed over the years.