The Years With Ross

James Thurber's affectionate account of his years working for New Yorker founder Harold Ross is filled with anecdotes that will surprise anyone who thought the magazine was the product of an intellectual. Ross was an ambitious, hard-working, manic editor, but he couldn't be bothered to read anything but pieces for his magazine. He once poked his head into a assistant's office and asked: "Is Moby Dick the man or the whale?" He refused to read A Farewell to Arms because "I understand the hero keeps getting in bed with women, and the war wasn't fought that way." His favorite marginal note on manuscripts was "Who that?" He said there were only two names guaranteed to be recognized by every reader: Harry Houdini and Sherlock Holmes. A person meeting Ross for the first time at a dinner said that in the first half-hour he couldn't imagine anyone less suited to running the New Yorker. By the end of the evening he couldn't imagine it being run by anyone else.