It is generally acknowledged (among journalists) that the only people interested in books about journalism and journalists are other journalists. But Thomas Kunkel’s Genius in Disguise I hope is an exception. His subject, Harold Ross, is an endlessly fascinating character, the founder of one of the country’s great magazines who turned up in the right place and at the right time to gather around him some of the most colorful characters in journalism and publishing.
The magazine is The New Yorker. The place is New York City; Manhattan, to be specific. The time is the second quarter of the 20th century. The cast are the literary elite, working journalists and aspiring writers who populated New York at a time of exuberant creativity and fun that has seldom been matched.
Strictly speaking, Harold Ross did not bring all of these people together. New York was full of successful writers before Ross and The New Yorker appeared on the scene and many of the writers and editors who flourished at the magazine were not attracted to it by Ross. He was, after all, an unknown quantity when he founded The New Yorker in 1925. But Ross was a catalyst around which a fascinating cast of characters coalesced.
A natural
I already have written about James Thurber’s entertaining memoir, The Years with Ross, which chronicles that author’s time with the magazine and his relationship with its founding editor. While Thurber has been roundly criticized for his accuracy, there is no disputing that his book is a wonderful read. Kunkel provides a more detailed and nuanced account of a man who was so easy to caricature that he often appears only as a cartoon.
The cartoon usually is of an uneducated man, something of a boob, who accidentally created a literate magazine that attracted great writers. His ignorance as an editor supposedly exasperated writers while inadvertently forcing them to write with greater clarity.
The reality is that although Harold Ross had little formal schooling he was a natural journalist who was working at newspapers from the time he was 13. By the time he entered the Army in World War I where he helped establish (with Alexander Woollcott) the original Stars and Stripes newspaper he was an experienced reporter and editor who had worked at papers across the country and in Panama. When he came to New York after the war he knew what he wanted to do in The New Yorker. Articulating and achieving that vision was not easy, but he was an exacting editor and worked steadily toward it while guiding others toward the same goal.
The right time and place
New York in the 1920s attracted everyone who had any ambition in theatre, literature and journalism, and Ross new them all. Some established names such as Woollcott and Dorothy Parker contributed to The New Yorker. But the writers and editors who made the magazine what he wanted it to be, such as Thurber, E.B. White, Wolcott Gibbs and a host of others too numerous to mention, were largely nurtured by Ross and his ambition.
Many of the New York crowd from the 1920s eventually ended up in Hollywood writing for the movies, but it was New York that shaped much of the nation’s literary talent in the 1920s and ‘30s and there is no way to tell the story of Harold Ross without telling that story as well. By the time of Ross’s death in 1951 The New Yorker had done a lot of growing up. Kunkel, a newspaper man and educator, does a great job telling the story of a natural reporter and driven editor who took his magazine from sophomoric to sophisticated in that quarter century.
If you’d like to enjoy this journey, look for Genius in Disguise at your local library or bookstore.