Harold W. Ross

Harold Wallace Ross (November 6, 1892 - December 6, 1951) was an American journalist and founder of The New Yorker magazine, which he edited from the magazine's inception in 1925 to his death. Under Ross' leadership, the innovative magazine would herald a new era of publishing, thanks to its unique approach to modern literary works, current events, social and political issues, and humorous cartoons.

Life

Born in Aspen, Colorado to George and Ida (Martin) Ross, Harold was the son of an Irish immigrant and a schoolteacher. Ida Ross sponsored poetry readings and “similar occasions of an edifying nature.” George Ross was something of an observant satirist who liked to argue against organized religion. His father's skills in observation and satire, combined with mother's morals and teacher’s sensibilities, shaped Ross’s perspective in life.

When Ross was eight, the family left Aspen because of the collapse in the price of silver, moving to Redcliff and Silverton, Colorado, then to Salt Lake City, Utah. There, he worked on the high school paper and was a stringer for The Salt Lake Tribune. The young Ross had adventure in his blood, dropping out of school at thirteen and running away to his uncle's in Denver where he worked for The Denver Post. Though he returned to his family, he did not return to school, instead getting a job at The Salt Lake Telegram, where he often joined police offices and firefighters on assignment. Ross read dime novels of the time and followed news reports of international conflicts, such as the Russo-Japanese War. These stories inspired him to join the US Army as a war correspondent.

In World War I, he enlisted in the U.S. Army Eighteenth Engineers Railway Regiment. He edited the regimental journal and went to Paris, France to work for Stars and Stripes (the only military-sponsored magazine US soldiers had to read at the time) , serving from February 1918 to April 1919. On Stars and Stripes, he met Alexander Woollcott, Cyrus Baldridge, Franklin Pierce Adams, and Jane Grant, who would become his first wife and helped back The New Yorker. By the time he was twenty-five, Ross had worked for at least seven different newspapers.

The New Yorker

Main article: The New Yorker

Starting the Magazine

After the war, Ross returned to New York City and assumed the editorship of a magazine for veterans, The Home Sector. It folded in 1920 and was absorbed by The American Legion Weekly. He then spent a few weeks at The Judge, a humorous magazine. These magazines were where Ross planned a new journal, one with metropolitan sensibilities and a sophisticated tone. It was a partnership between Ross and yeast heir Raoul Fleishmann that established the F-R Publishing Company to publish the magazine.

While working as an editor at The Judge in the fall of 1924, Ross created his prospectus for The New Yorker to secure enough financial support to launch the magazine. Ross was one of the original members of the Algonquin Round Table. He used his contacts from "The Vicious Circle" to help get The New Yorker off the ground. The first two paragraphs explain Ross' intentions for his magazine, as well as how it would differ from competing magazines of the day:

"The New Yorker will be a reflection in word and picture of metropolitan life. It will be human. Its general tenor will be one of gaiety, wit, and satire, but it will be more than a jester. It will not be commonly called radical or highbrow. It will be what is commonly called sophisticated, in that it will assume a reasonable degree of enlightenement on the part of its readers. It will hate bunk.

"As compared to the newspaper, The New Yorker will be interpretive rather than stenographic. It will print facts that it will have to go behind the scenes to get, but it will not deal in scandal for the sake of scandal, nor sensation for the sake of sensation. Its integrity will e aove suspicion. It hopes to e so entertaining and informative as to be a necessity for the person who knows his way about or wants to."

With this model, Ross set to create The New Yorker as a new, innovative standard in magazine publishing that changed the face of contemporary fiction, literary journalism, and comic humor and art, as well as dealing with the issues of cultural and social agendas of the day.

Initial Years

The New Yorker was intended as a more refined humor magazine compared to The Judge and other magazines of the day. Ross famously declared in the magazine's first issue, "It has announced that it is not edited for the old lady in Dubuque."

The New Yorker was launched in February 1925 and its first issue immediately sold out, but the magazine floundered in the following months. Ross attributed the sales drop from early issues to the magazine’s confusing and unpromising content, which lead to circulation plummeting drastically by May. He was so concerned about the magazine’s aimlessness that he apologized with a letter addressed to the writing staff. He argued that the magazine was too humorous and that content needed to be ‘more serious and purposeful.’ He set to make The New Yorker to be more topical and relevant to public discourse. The magazine’s art soon became a major staple and helped increase appeal, but Ross felt that its written text wasn’t a match for its artistic quality.

Ross considered closing the magazine but instead decided to regroup for the fall season with improved content and a more confident tone. The magazine lost an average of $2,000 a week for three years, and sales had to reach $700,000 to make it profitable. Gradually, The New Yorker began attracting Ross’ intended audience of sophisticated, humorous, socially-aware readers. Ross maintained that, in order for the magazine to survive and avoid its past mistakes, the advertising department be kept totally separate from the editorial staff, lest content suffer from a conflict of interest that would return the magazine to its earlier, unorganized issues. With a more refined approach and a steadily-growing readership, the magazine eventually attracted writers, editors, and artists of a higher caliber, either experienced or beginner. The magazine’s stature quickly rose to a level that established celebrities of the day, such as Groucho Marx and F. Scott Fitzgerald, actively pursued Ross and submitted work as contributors.

Writing and Editorial Style

Ross’ writing style was self-taught, as he was a reader of few books and had never worked for a book or drama department that would have taught him how to edit a magazine. As a high school dropout, he had a suspicion of the fickleness of words with multiple meanings, and he would always aim for simplicity and clarity, limiting metaphors, similes, and figures of speech.

Ross was a careful and conscientious editor who strove to keep his magazine clear and concise. One famous query to his writers was "Who he?" because Ross believed the only two people everyone in the English-speaking world was familiar with were Harry Houdini and Sherlock Holmes. He also was notorious for overusing commas. Very aware of his limited education, his bible was Fowler's Modern English Usage.

Literary ignorance meant that Ross did not consider reputation and experience when he hired writers. He focused on whatever skills they could display in front of him. Thus, a famous and renowned writer had just as much chance to write for the magazine as a budding amateur. All writers were subject to the same standards.

Ross evaluated every line of copy two or three times over, with notes for authors that ranged from a brief note of advice to long comments about verbosity. He edited every issue of the magazine from the first until his death— a total of 1,399 issues. He would be succeeded as editor by William Shawn.

Ross obsessed over punctuation usage and word searches for the sake of precision. He was known to search obsessively through Webster's Dictionary and Roget's Thesaurus for ideally accurate words, and he would spend several hours experimenting with punctuation to improve article consistency and style. These habits spilled over to the rest of the writing and editorial staff, a tradition that continues at The New Yorker to this day.

The New Yorker is known for limiting swear words in its articles, a practice started in part by Ross’ awareness that vulgarity indicated class while the magazine’s intended purpose was to reflect a 'cultured New York City.' Ross himself was famous for his liberal use of curse words, yet he would be the first to point out the double standard of print versus spoken word.

Legacy

Near the end of his life, Ross suffered from bouts of illness and chronic ulcers. By July of 1951, Ross, a heavy smoker, was diagnosed with cancer of the trachea. Ross' treatment included fie weeks of radiation therapy, which was a relatively new approach at the time. The cancer soon spread to his lungs, and he died during operation on December 6, 1951, at the age of 59. His funeral was described as 'strangely impersonal,' as many celebrated writers, politicians, and performers attended the service but very few present were particularly close to Ross.

The New Yorker inspired an approach to magazine publishing that emphasized quality and sophistication over sensationalistic news. Ross' famous editorial and hiring approaches, as well as his rules and standards for the magazine, continue to this day.

Ross gave many writers and artists their first start at The New Yorker, all of whom became well-known in their respective fields during or after their work at the magazine. The following is a partial list of staff that Ross personally hired in the first few years of the magazine:

Writers

Artists

Peter Arno
Charles Addams
Otto Soglow
Whitney Darrow
George Price

Ross also kept up a volumnious correspondence, which is available to researchers at the New York Public Library.

Bibliography

Alistair Cooke. Memories of The Great & The Good. New York: Random House, 1999. ISBN 1559704799
Brendan Gill. Here at The New Yorker. New York: Random House, 1975. ISBN 0394489896
Dale Kramer. Ross and The New Yorker. New York: Double Day & Company, 1951.
Thomas Kunkel. Genius in Disguise: Harold Ross of the New Yorker. New York: Random House, 1995. ISBN 0-679-41837-7.
Thomas Kunkel. Letters From the Editor: The New Yorker's Harold Ross. New York: The Modern Library, 2000. ISBN 0375503978
James Thurber. The Years With Ross. Boston: Little, Brown, 1959. ISBN 0-06-095971-1 (2001 reprint).
Ben Yagoda. About Town: The New Yorker and the World It Made. New York: Scribners, 2000. ISBN 0-684-81605-9.

External links

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