happy bornday to a brilliant dude. many thanks from this little gal for all you did...now he was not lazy.
It's the birthday of Harold Ross, born in Aspen, Colorado (1892), who founded The New Yorker magazine. He was gap-toothed, his hair was always a mess, and he spoke with a Western twang. He had never finished high school, and people sometimes joked that he'd only read one book in his life. But he had actually started out as a migratory newspaperman, traveling the country and filing hundreds of stories from California and Brooklyn and New Orleans and Panama. He later said of that period in his life, "If I stayed anywhere more than two weeks, I thought I was in a rut."
He settled in New York after serving in World War I, at a time when the city was suddenly filling up with smart, interesting people in their late twenties, and it occurred to him that there was no national magazine being written for this new generation. All the popular magazines at the time were either too intellectual or too middlebrow. Ross wanted to create a magazine that was funny and entertaining and unpretentious, and the result was The New Yorker, which came out February 21, 1925.
Ross knew right away that the magazine should have a distinctive look, and so he made sure that it was filled with cartoons. But at a time when most cartoons were caricatures of public figures or just one-line gags with a picture attached, Ross insisted that his artists draw real things and real situations — people at bars or in offices or at parties or at home with their families. In the end, he helped invent the kind of cartoon that The New Yorker still publishes today.
Ross's genius was in spotting talent in writers and hanging on to those writers. He personally hired E.B. White, James Thurber, Janet Flanner, A.J. Liebling, and Joseph Mitchell. Some of his employees were driven crazy by his endless memos and writing suggestions, or the way that he would walk into the writers' office and shout that he wanted to hear fingers pounding typewriters. But most people said they never really knew him. James Thurber wrote, "You caught only glimpses of Ross, even if you spent a long evening with him. He was always in mid-flight, or on the edge of his chair, alighting or about to take off."
He settled in New York after serving in World War I, at a time when the city was suddenly filling up with smart, interesting people in their late twenties, and it occurred to him that there was no national magazine being written for this new generation. All the popular magazines at the time were either too intellectual or too middlebrow. Ross wanted to create a magazine that was funny and entertaining and unpretentious, and the result was The New Yorker, which came out February 21, 1925.
Ross knew right away that the magazine should have a distinctive look, and so he made sure that it was filled with cartoons. But at a time when most cartoons were caricatures of public figures or just one-line gags with a picture attached, Ross insisted that his artists draw real things and real situations — people at bars or in offices or at parties or at home with their families. In the end, he helped invent the kind of cartoon that The New Yorker still publishes today.
Ross's genius was in spotting talent in writers and hanging on to those writers. He personally hired E.B. White, James Thurber, Janet Flanner, A.J. Liebling, and Joseph Mitchell. Some of his employees were driven crazy by his endless memos and writing suggestions, or the way that he would walk into the writers' office and shout that he wanted to hear fingers pounding typewriters. But most people said they never really knew him. James Thurber wrote, "You caught only glimpses of Ross, even if you spent a long evening with him. He was always in mid-flight, or on the edge of his chair, alighting or about to take off."
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