Story of the Week: The First Years

James Thurber (1894–1961)
From James Thurber: Writings & Drawings

Interesting Links
Online exhibition: “A Century of The New Yorker: Beginnings” (New York Public Library)

“Celebrating The New Yorker’s 100th . . . A Toast to Harold Ross” (Michael Maslin, Ink Spill)

Previous Story of the Week selections from the Ross Years
• “If Grant Had Been Drinking at Appomattox,” James Thurber
• “Joey on the Cake Line,” John O’Hara
• “Insert Flap 'A' and Throw Away,” S. J. Perelman
• “Children Are Bored on Sunday,” Jean Stafford

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The first and last of James Thurber’s six covers for The New Yorker: a drawing titled “New Tricks” for the February 29, 1936, issue and an untitled cartoon commemorating the Westminster Dog Show for the February 9, 1946, issue. (New Yorker archive)

By the time he was 35, Raoul Fleischmann, a scion of the Fleischmann Yeast family and director of its bakeries, had become sick of the bread business. In 1921, he renewed an acquaintance with Franklin P. Adams, whose nationally syndicated column, “The Conning Tower,” appeared in the New York Tribune, and joined him for occasional games of poker at the apartment of the Broadway playwright George Kaufman, where he met the likes of future novelist Henry Miller, New York Times drama critic Alexander Woollcott, songwriter Irving Berlin, and American Legion Weekly editor Harold Ross. “One day early in 1924,” Fleischmann recalled, “Ross asked me to lunch and suggested that we start a new comic paper. What I knew about publishing was zero.” Fleischmann turned down this first appeal, but Ross tried again a few months later and “this time the idea was that the magazine was to be built around New York, with humor as merely an adjunct of the publication.”

The new weekly was, of course, The New Yorker, now celebrating its 100th year. “I wasn’t at all impressed with Ross’s knowledge of publishing,” Fleischmann admitted. “I had no reason to doubt his skill as an editor, nor any reason to believe in it. I had merely got into something I couldn’t get out of gracefully.” Fleischmann’s only serious attempt to get out of it occurred early on, during the summer of 1925, when he became concerned about the magazine’s losses in money and circulation. He told Ross that they needed to “suspend publication” but soon changed his mind and, with $100,000 provided by his mother, the magazine stumbled forward without missing an issue.

Aside from Ross’s short gig at American Legion, the total of his management experience was his editorship of the Parisian edition of Stars and Stripes during World War I, when he was 26 years old. During the decade before the war, he crisscrossed the nation and worked as a reporter for no fewer than nine papers, from the San Francisco Call to the Atlanta Journal. His start came when he was thirteen or fourteen, working as a stringer for the Salt Lake City Tribune. “One of his assignments there was to interview the madam of a house of prostitution,” James Thurber related in an oft-shared anecdote. “Always self-conscious and usually uncomfortable in the presence of all but his closest women friends, the young reporter began by saying to the bad woman (he divided the other sex into good and bad), ‘How many fallen women do you have?’”

Adams and Woollcott both wrote for Stars and Stripes in France while Ross was editor, and the three became friends. While in Paris, Ross also met Jane Grant, a Times city desk reporter who was in Europe as a singer and dancer to entertain the troops and who would become, with Ross and Fleischmann, one of the three founders of The New Yorker. Shortly after returning to New York in 1919, Ross and Grant married. In June the three men joined with other writers for a party at the Algonquin Hotel, the success of which led to the establishment of the Round Table, a group that met every day for lunch—and that provided much of the talent to The New Yorker during its first decade.

By the end of the 1920s, after Fleischmann had sunk an estimated $700,000 in the business, the magazine was turning a profit, with a circulation of nearly 100,000—respectable but far from the powerhouse it would later become. As Thurber confided to a journalist writing a profile on Ross, “His mother was never persuaded that Harold’s position on The New Yorker ever amounted to much. . . . He showed her over the office one day but she made no comment. He asked her at dinner that night, ‘Well, what do you think of The New Yorker, Mama?’ She sighed and replied, ‘Harold, I hope that someday you become connected with The Saturday Evening Post.”’

Thurber sold his first piece to The New Yorker at the beginning of 1927, after a half year’s worth of rejections. He met staff writer E. B. White soon after that small success, and White introduced him to Ross, who hired him immediately as a “managing editor” responsible for the administrative aspects of the magazine—a position Thurber was uniquely unqualified for. At the time, the staff included Katharine Angell (who later married White) and Ralph Ingersoll. They were subsequently joined by Wolcott Gibbs, Brendan Gill, Gus Lobrano, and Robert Coates, all of whom had extraordinary careers as editors and authors.

“The New Yorker was the turning point, the crucial element, in Thurber’s life, just as he was a crucial element in the magazine’s development,” noted Robert Gottlieb in a 2003 reappraisal of Thurber. “But at the start no one knew quite what to do with him. Ross, as always, was in search of an administrative editor who could, through some arcane magic, make sense of the chaos that he thrived on, hiring a procession of young men ill-equipped to fill this slot—‘Hell, I hire anybody’—then quickly dumping them.” Rather than dump Thurber, Ross kept him on as an editor, writer, and, eventually, cartoonist.

Thirty years later, Thurber chronicled the chaos in “The Years with Ross,” a series of ten articles in The Atlantic Monthly; it was extensively revised and published in 1959 as a book. We present from the book the selection titled "The First Years," which covers The New Yorker’s founding and James Thurber’s hiring. In his biography of Thurber, Harrison Kinney acknowledges that the work is “considered mischievously inaccurate by some of his colleagues and other Ross admirers. . . . One of his responsibilities as a serious humorist, he believed, was to burnish the lackluster events of human existence to the sheen of good stories and apologize later for any wreckage.” Yet underlying the raillery and self-aggrandizement is a decidedly fond portrait of the editor who changed the lives of so many writers.

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Notes: In the selection below, Thurber refers to an episode described in the first chapter of The Years with Ross, a “turning point” in his relationship with his boss. While Thurber was visiting his family in Columbus, his Scottish terrier Jeannie escaped. It took extraordinary efforts and several days to find her, and he returned to New York two days late. When Ross dismissively chided his employee and implied that his concern for a dog was unmanly, Thurber lost his temper and suggested that he get somebody else to help him with the magazine. “Who would you suggest I call in?” Ross asked, and Thurber responded, “Alexander Woollcott”—which launched both men into fits of laughter. “An hour later we were having dinner together at Tony’s after a couple of drinks.”

Herman Mankiewicz was a screenwriter, movie producer, and film director, best known for the screenplay of Citizen Kane (1941). Thurber’s references to Dubuque evoke a famous (or, perhaps, infamous) line in the magazine’s original prospectus: “The New Yorker will be the magazine which is not edited for the old lady in Dubuque. It will not be concerned in what she is thinking about. This is not meant in disrespect, but The New Yorker is a magazine avowedly published for a metropolitan audience. . . .” Ben Turpin was a slapstick comedian, famous for his crossed eyes, who starred in many silent films produced and directed by Mack Sennett. The U.S. navy dirigible Shenandoah crashed during a thunderstorm in Ohio in 1925, resulting in the deaths of 14 crew members. New York Giants pitcher Christy Mathewson died of tuberculosis at the age of 45 in 1925. Hero and Leander is a Greek myth about two lovers who lived on the opposite sides of the Hellespont strait. The Synder trial refers to the conviction and execution of Ruth Snyder and her lover Henry Todd Gray for the 1927 murder of Snyder’s husband.

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I had never heard of the New Yorker when I sailed from New York on the Leviathan in May, 1925, for a year in France. . . . If you don't see the full selection below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

This selection is used by permission.
To photocopy and distribute this selection for classroom use, please contact the Copyright Clearance Center.

Sunday, April 20, 2025

The First Years