Letters from the Editor The New Yorker's Harold Ross [Paperback]

These exhilarating letters—selected and introduced by Thomas Kunkel, who wroteGenius in Disguise, the distinguished Ross biography—tell the dramatic story of the birth ofThe New Yorkerand 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.Thomas Kunkel is the author of a biography of Ross,Genius in Disguise, andEnormous Prayers. He works at the University of Maryland College of Journalism and lives in Burtonsville, Maryland.Researching a biography is often compared to detective work, and certainly much sleuthing must transpire before the first word ever slips from the writer's fingertips. Even so, I find this analogy altogether too grim, not only for its criminal overtones but for its suggestion of a kind of purposeful slogging on the part of the pursuer. For most biographers there is more sheer joy in the exercise than that; it is less a life-or-death pursuit than an open-ended game of hide-and-seek. Some writers find their quarry, others never do. The serendipity is part of the fun.

As for me, I found Harold Wallace Ross in Room 328 of the New York Public Library. True, he had been dead for more than forty years. But Ross, founding editor and guiding spirit ofThe New Yorkermagazine, is loudly, reprovingllƒ.