It was E. B. White who presented James Thurber to Harold Ross, editor of The New Yorker. Ross assumed that they were friends although actually they had met only a few minutes earlier, and as he was continually in search of the ideal managing editor, he hired Thurber on the spot, at twice the salary Thurber had been receiving as a reporter for the New York Evening Post.
JAMES THURBER’S faculty of total recall has yielded for his readers such prime reminiscences as MY LIFE AND HARD TIMES and other fine gleanings from his early years in Columbus, Ohio. This account of a wakeful night he sent to the ATLANTIC only a few days before his last illness.
JAMES THURBER has in recent months turned his interest in comedy in the direction of the theater, and with much success. After a long and well-received tryout through the Middle West, A THURBER CARNIVALwas classified by VARIETYas a hit on Broadway, although friends in St. Louis had told Mr. Thurber that CARNIVAL was “too sophisticated for New York.”In September he joined the cast of the show, playing the role of himself.
In the foreword to JAMES THURBER’S first, slim volume of drawings, Dorothy Parker recounted how hecklers had found the Thurber women to have no sex appeal, to which the artist replied, “ They have for my men.” This certainly applies to the heroine of his new cocktail party, Mrs. Groper. Readers wanting more of Thurber are advised to consult his most recent and popular book, THE YEARS WITH ROSS.
Macaulay once said: “I hate the notion of gregarious authors. The less we have to do with each other, the better.” JAMES THURBER, in his most humorous vein, here testifies to the correctness of Macaulay’s statement as he demonstrates what happens when authors get together. Mr. Thurber is the author of the runaway best seller, THE YEARS WITH ROSS, recently published by Atlantic—Little, Brown.
This is the tenth and concluding part of JAMES THURBER’S memoir of Harold W. Ross, creator and editor of the NEW YORKER. The association between the two men began in 1927 and ended with Ross’s death in 1951. A considerably enlarged version of THE YEARS WITH ROSS, with supplementary accounts by E. B. White Wolcott Gibbs, A. J. Liebling, and others of Ross’s staff, will he published in book form early in 1959 by Atlantic-Little, Brown.
The hard-fought friendship between Harold Ross and Alexander Woollcott lasted a quarter century or more and ended in a draw. Each had such contempt for the other that their wordy relationship persisted long after other men would have gone their separate ways in offended dignity and silence. This is the ninth part of JAMES THURBER’S series about the late editor of the NEW YORKER. His tenth and concluding article will appear in the August ATLANTIC.
“Sex is an incident,”Harold floss was given to asserting, but in the offices of his NEW YORKKR magazine, and indeed elsewhere in New York, it sometimes became somewhat more than that. This is the eighth part in JAMES THURBER’S series.
To be a Miracle Man on Harold Ross’s NEW YORKER was a summons that few of those tapped for the position knew enough to refuse. But the miracle proved to be the velocity with which the incumbents came and went. Poets, editors, writers, and men about town were hired, only to be fired, often for nonexistent reasons, after a short and painful interval on the job. This, the seventh part of JAMES THURBER’S series, continues his discussion of the long line of Ross’s Miracle Men.
To be a Miracle Man on Harold Ross’s NEW YORKER was a summons that few of those lapped for the position knew enough to refuse. But the miracle proved to be the velocity with which the incumbents came and went. Poets, editors, writers, and men about town were hired, only to be fired, often for nonexistent reasons, after a short and painful interval on the job. This is the sixth part of JAMES THURBER’S series.
In comic art, decorations, and covers, Harold W. Ross proceeded to lay down as many new standards in his budding magazine, the NEW YORKER, as he was achieving at the same time in other areas of journalism. In this fifth part of his series JAMES THURBER takes us into the Tuesday afternoon “art meeting,” at which Ross and his staff settled such questions as how a seal’s whiskers should be drawn, and many other issues great and small.
Of all the innovations which Harold Ross devised when he first put together the NEW YORKER, the department which he called “The Talk of the Town” was the most peculiarly his own. Under his ceaseless editorial drive it became a potent new style of journalism in which, JAMES THURBER tells us, the laugh discloses the fact or the fact creates the laugh. This is the fourth part of Mr. Thurber’s series.
So quickly did Harold Ross bring the NEW YORKER to maturity that few can recall today the confusion and naïveté of its first two years. In this third part of his series, JAMES THURBER digs into an old office folder and shows how subcollegiate jokes and frivolity gave way before the varied talents with which the editor was soon surrounding himself.
The extraordinary respect which writers and artists felt for the opinions of Harold Ross is the basis of Part II in JAMES THURBER’S extended series about the late editor of the NEW YORKER. With little or no formal education and a weirdly jumbled reading background, Ross became nevertheless the creator of entirely new standards in many aspects of literature and journalism.
Celebrated for his contributions to the NEW YORKER as writer and artist, JAMES THURBERis uniquely qualified to undertake this memoir of Harold W. Ross, that magazine’s creator. In this, the first of a series, we are shown the early stages of the turbulent and affectionate relationship — Thurber as staff man and Ross as editor — which began in 1927 and ended with Ross’s death in December, 1951.