FROM THE PUBLISHER

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 CRITICS

Publishers Weekly

Harold Ross (1892-1951) was the founding editor and guiding spirit of the New Yorker, and this sampling of his voluminous correspondence offers a breezy romp through a quarter-century of the magazine's history. Included are letters to E.B. White, James Thurber, Robert Benchley, Dorothy Parker, Saul Steinberg and many other talents whom Ross discovered and nurtured. Though restless, chain-smoking, Colorado-born Ross, an immigrant miner's son, could be awkward in public discourse, his letters reveal an articulate, keen intellect possessed by a tough, pragmatic, embattled editor who is everywhere at once--prodding writers to create, assuaging big egos, sparring with business partner Raoul Fleischmann. By turns serious, whimsical, gossipy, pointed and irascible, these letters demolish the notion that Ross was a bumpkin whose brainchild magazine succeeded in spite of him. The recipients of these missives comprise an astonishing who's who: Nabokov, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Rebecca West, John O'Hara, Ernst Lubitsch, Richard Rodgers, Moss Hart, J. Edgar Hoover, Nehru, Henry Luce, Ian Fleming and Harry Truman, to name a few. While much is ephemera or shop talk, Ross biographer Kunkel has skillfully linked the letters with commentaries to trace the New Yorker's evolution from shaky startup to carefree oasis during the Depression to committed world journal in WW II to cosmopolitan liberal forum during the Cold War. There are a smattering of autobiographical letters, which shed light, for example, on Ross's divorce from first wife Jane Grant ("I'm married to this magazine," he confesses). Reading these letters is like eavesdropping on a beehive of creative activity. (Feb.) Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.

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, NYPL

Christopher Lehmann-Haupt - The New York Times

Ross devoted several hours of his day to typing letters. "I got started and off I went, it seems," was his explanation. He encouraged contributors: "Maybe the only thing for you to do is to keep on writing and become a writer," he wrote to John O'Hara in 1930 in response to a request for a job. He regaled his friends with stories...He cajoled the members of his staff: "White," he wrote by hand to E. B. White, one of his mainstays, "Will you pls. look in on me when you wake up? I never disturb a sleeping man. Ross."

In Mr. Kunkel's biography of Ross, Genius in Disguise: Harold Ross of The New Yorkerhe set about to dispel the prevailing impression of his subject, who never even graduated from high school, as "a perpetually confused hayseed, a naif, an uncouth provincial who succeeded almost in spite of himself." The letters collected here do the job all by themselves by consistently conveying the distinctive clarity of Ross's voice.

Jesse Oxfeld - Brill's Content