Genius in disguise

by Thomas Kunkel

"Magazines are about eighty-five percent luck," Harold Ross told George Jean Nathan. "I was about the luckiest son of a bitch alive when I started The New Yorker.". Ross was certainly lucky back in 1925, but he was smart, too. When such unknown young talents as E. B. White, James Thurber, Janet Flanner, Helen Hokinson, Wolcott Gibbs, and Peter Arno turned up on his doorstep, he knew exactly what to do with them. So was born what many people consider the most urbane and groundbreaking magazine in history. Thomas Kunkel has written the first comprehensive biography of Harold W. Ross, the high school dropout and Colorado miner's son who somehow blew out of the West to become a seminal figure in American journalism and letters, and a man whose story is as improbable as it is entertaining. The author follows Ross from his trainhopping start as an itinerant newspaperman to his editorship of The Stars and Stripes, to his role in the formation of the Algonquin Round Table, to his audacious and