Harold Wallace Ross was an American journalist and editor. He served as an editor-in-chief of the "The New Yorker magazine" from 1925 until his death.
Background
Harold Wallace Ross was born in Aspen, Colorado, a silver-mining town high in the Rockies. His father, George Ross, was of Scottish descent and had emigrated from the North of Ireland. His mother, Ida Martin Ross, came of New England stock, had been a schoolteacher in Kansas, and suspected that she had married beneath her station. When the success of the New Yorker made her son a national figure, Ida Ross continued to hope that he might eventually win a more satisfactory position for himself on the Saturday Evening Post.
Education
Although Ross did well in grade school, he was impatient with the discipline of the classroom and dropped out early in his high-school career. Later, it was rumored of him that in his lifetime he had read only one single book all the way through; it was also rumored of him that it was he who launched the rumor. In truth, he read little but he had a reverence for words and especially for correct grammar. Like most self-educated men, he wanted words to mean precisely what the dictionaries said they meant; he was awed by Webster and Fowler and learned from the latter to scorn the highfalutin and merely genteel.
Career
After a few years as a sort of hobo-reporter on newspapers in the South and West, Ross in 1917, upon the entry of the United States into World War I, joined the army and was shipped off to France. The discipline of army life proving even less agreeable to him than that of school, he went AWOL and wound up, disheveled but happy, in Paris.
He ought to have been jailed for his offense and perhaps executed; instead, he was placed in charge of editing the newly founded army newspaper Stars and Stripes. He performed this task carelessly and brilliantly and after the war, on settling down in New York, was asked to take charge of a new publication sponsored by the American Legion.
With characteristic restlessness, Ross soon decided that he wished to produce a magazine of his own. He talked a new friend and fellow poker-player, Raoul Fleischmann, into providing financial backing for a humorous weekly magazine that would take care not to be edited for "the old lady in Dubuque. " Fleischmann, the young heir to a bread-baking fortune, expected to gamble some $20, 000 on the risky enterprise; by the time the magazine caught on, a year or so after the first issue of February 21, 1925, Fleischmann had poured upwards of $750, 000 into it. In its early days, the magazine was an impoverished-looking creation, funny in purpose but incoherent in execution.
The first cover, drawn by Rea Irvin, depicted the sophisticated dandy who came to be known as Eustace Tilley, but there was little that was sophisticated about the contents. Gradually, the humorists Robert Benchley, Dorothy Parker, Corey Ford, and Frank Sullivan began writing for the upstart New Yorker instead of for the better-known (and then better-edited) Vanity Fair. The voice of the magazine--what amounted to its soul--developed out of the mingled voices of E. B. White, James Thurber, and Wolcott Gibbs; also to be heard was the voice of Katharine Sergeant Angell White, who helped introduce such writers of fiction as John O'Hara, Jean Stafford, and John Cheever.
Among the "fact" writers who first wrote for the magazine in the 1930's were Alva Johnston, A. J. Liebling, and Joseph Mitchell. Ross stood behind them and behind the artists--Peter Arno, George Price, Alan Dunn, Mary Petty, Whitney Darrow, Jr. , Charles Addams, and the rest--and pushed and shoved and cajoled and bullyragged them into fruition. He saw his job as encouraging people more talented than he to do their work better than they had hitherto known how to do it, largely by being harder on themselves than they had been accustomed to being. That was his chief principle, which he took care to pass along to his successor, William Shawn.
By the time of the magazine's twenty-fifth anniversary, a year before his death, Ross had relinquished much of the weekly running of the magazine to Shawn. When the circulation passed 300, 000, Ross grumbled, "We must be doing something wrong. " Though his appetite for work diminished, his eye for quality remained sharp and so did his tongue. No artist or writer could get away with what Ross thought of as cheating: doing less than one's best.
From time to time, Ross referred to "journalistic integrity, " by which he meant many things, some of which he could identify and some of which he could not. Ross was no moral philosopher, and his social conscience was shaky, and he knew nothing whatever about politics, but he had a profound ethical sense when it came to journalism. The truthfulness and accuracy were part of it. The aversion to falseness was part. But there was something more. He held to some resolve--scarcely ever hinted at in words--never to publish anything, never to have something written, for a hidden reason: to promote somebody or something, to pander to somebody, to build somebody up or tear somebody down, to indulge a personal friendship or animosity, or to propagandize. Everything that was published in the New Yorker was precisely what it purported to be, was published for its own sake.
He liked card-games and fishing and sitting up late over drinks when his health was good. But the morning, noon, and night of his life was the magazine that he invented; nothing mattered so much to him as the pursuit of excellence in its name.
Achievements
Personality
Quotes from others about the person
Shawn wrote of Ross: "He was an enormously intelligent man who worked almost entirely by instinct and intuition".
Interests
card-games, fishing
Connections
Ross was married three times--in 1920 to Jane Cole Grant (they were divorced in 1929); in 1934 to Marie Franeoise Elie (they were divorced five years later); and in 1940 to Ariane Allen, who survived him. By his second marriage he had one daughter.