40s

The following is theintroduction to “The 40s: The Story of a Decade,” ananthology of New Yorker articles, stories, andpoemspublished this week.Gap-toothed andspiky-haired, Harold Ross arrived in New York after the Great War and soonbecame one ofthe city’smostfantasticalcharacters. He was twenty-seven, aneccentric searcher shaped by a dropoutyouth in the American West and a knockabout start in the newsbusiness; before he enlisted, he’d worked fortwo dozenpapers, some of them for nomore than a few weeks. Ross had a luckywar. Hebattled the Germans byediting Stars & Stripes in Paris. When helanded in Manhattan, he took up residence in Hell’s Kitchen and went to work for a veterans’publication called The Home Sector. Healso worked for a few months, in 1924, forJudge, a Republican-funded humormagazine. In the meantime, heacquired acircle of young Jazz Agefriends (he playedsoftball with Harpo Marx and Billy Rose, shot ducks with Bernard Baruch) and conceived anidea for a fizzy Manhattan-centric magazine ofhis own―a “fifteen-cent comicpaper,” he called it. Forfinancial backing, he hit up a baking and yeastscionnamed Raoul Fleischmann. Ross never really liked Fleischmann (“Themajor owner of The New Yorkeris a fool,” he once wrote; “theventure therefore is built on quicksand”), but Fleischmann gavehim thewherewithal to lure artists andwritersfromhisaccumulatingcircle offriends, hungryfreelancers, disgruntled newspapermen, and Broadwaylights. Harold Ross was inbusiness.From the moment hepublished thefirstissue of themagazine, in February 1925, hebecame one ofmidtown’smost talked-aboutcharacters. He was theprofane rubewho had amystical obsession with grammaticalpunctilio andsyntactical clarity. He was the untutored knucklehead (“Is Moby Dick the man or thewhale?” he famously asked)wholived on unfilteredcigarettes, pokerchips, and Scotch and yet somehowmanaged to hire James Thurber and E. B. White, Janet Flanner and Lillian Ross, Edmund Wilson and Vladimir Nabokov, A. J. Liebling and Joseph Mitchell. He could not afford to pay Hemingway’s short-story rates, and so―with theguidance of a fictiondepartmentled by a cultivated Bryn Mawr graduatenamed Katharine Angell (later Katharine White)―he went about discovering John O’Hara, John Cheever, J. D. Salinger, and Shirley Jackson. Hiseditorial queries (“Were the Nabokovs a one-nutcracker family?”) got to theheart of things.Ross was in on the joke ofhisbumpkinpersona, and laterbecameitscaptive, a lonely,