Synopses & Reviews
A Dime a Dozen
"Harold Ross died" December 6, 1951, "exactly one month after his" fifty-ninth birthday. In November of the following year the New Yorker entertained the editors of "Punch" and some of its outstanding artists and writers. I was in Bermuda and missed the party, but weeks later met Rowland Emett for lunch at the Algonquin. "I'm sorry you didn't get to meet Ross," I began as we sat down. "Oh, but I did," he said. "He was all over the place, Nobody talked about anybody else."
Ross is still all over the place for many of us, vitally stalking the corridors of our lives, disturbed and disturbing, fretting, stimulating, more evident in death than the living presence of ordinary men. A photograph of him, full face, almost alive with a sense of contained restlessness, hangs on a wall outside his old office. I am sure he had just said to the photographer, "I haven't got time for this." That's what he said, impatiently, to anyone-doctor, lawyer, tax man-who interrupted, even momentarily, the stream of his dedicated energy. Unless a meeting, conference, or consultation touched somehow upon the working of his magazine, he began mentally pacing.
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 won't sit still in anybody's mind long enough for a full-length portrait, After six years of thinking about it, I realized that to do justice to Harold Ross I must write about him the way he talked and lived-leaping from peak to peak. What follows here is a monologue montage of that first day and of half a dozen swift and similar sessions. He was standing behind his desk, scowling at a manuscript tying on it, as if it were about to lash out at him. I had caught glimpses of him at the theater and at the Algonquin and, like everybody else, was familiar with the mobile face that constantly changed expression, the carrying voice, the eloquent large-fingered hands that were never in repose, but kept darting this way and that to emphasize his points or running through the thatch of hair that stood straight up until Ina Claire said she would like to take her shoes off and walk through it. That got into the gossip columns and Ross promptly had his barber flatten down the pompadour.
He wanted, first of all, to know how old I was, and when I told him it set him off on a lecture. "Men don't mature in this country, Thurber," he said. "They're children. I was editor of the "Stars and Stripes" when I was twenty-five. Most men in their twenties don't know their way around yet. I think it's the goddam system of women schoolteachers." He went to the window behind his desk and stared disconsolately down into the street, coins in one of his pants pockets. I learned later that he made a point ofkeeping four or five dollars' worth of change in his pocket because he had once got stuck in a taxi, to his vast irritation, with nothing smaller than a ten-dollar bill. The driver couldn't change it and had to park and go into the store for coins and bills, and Ross didn't have time for that.
Ross was never conscious of his dramatic gestures, or of his natural gift of theatrical speech.
Synopsis
At the helm of America's most influential literary magazine for more than half a century, Harold Ross introduced the country to a host of exciting talent, including Robert Benchley, Alexander Woolcott, Ogden Nash, Peter Arno, Charles Addams, and Dorothy Parker. But no one could have written about this irascible, eccentric genius more affectionately or more critically than James Thurber -- an American icon in his own right -- whose portrait of Ross captures not only a complex literary giant but a historic friendship and a glorious era as well. "If you get Ross down on paper," warned Wolcott Gibbs to Thurber," nobody will ever believe it." But readers of this unforgettable memoir will find that they do.
Synopsis
From twentieth century humorist James Thurber, a celebrated and poignant memoir about his years at The New Yorker with the unforgettable Harold Ross.
Includes a new introduction by Adam Gopnik, and illustrations by James Thurber
"If you get Ross down on paper," warned Wolcott Gibbs to Thurber," nobody will ever believe it." But readers of this unforgettable memoir will find that they do.
At the helm of America's most influential literary magazine for more than half a century, Harold Ross introduced the country to a host of exciting talent, including Robert Benchley, Alexander Woolcott, Ogden Nash, Peter Arno, Charles Addams, and Dorothy Parker. But no one could have written about this irascible, eccentric genius more affectionately or more critically than James Thurber -- an American icon in his own right -- whose portrait of Ross captures not only a complex literary giant but a historic friendship and a glorious era as well.
Offering a peek into the lives of two American literary giants and the New York literary heyday, My Years with Ross is a true classic, and a testament to the enduring influence of their genius.
Synopsis
From iconic American humorist James Thurber, a celebrated and poignant memoir about his years at The New Yorker with the magazine's unforgettable founder and longtime editor, Harold Ross
"Extremely entertaining. . . . life at The New Yorker emerges as a lovely sort of pageant of lunacy, of practical jokes, of feuds and foibles. It is an affectionate picture of scamps playing their games around a man who, for all his brusqueness, loved them, took care of them, pampered and scolded them like an irascible mother hen." --New York Times
With a foreword by Adam Gopnik and illustrations by James Thurber
At the helm of America's most influential literary magazine from 1925 to 1951, Harold Ross introduced the country to a host of exciting talent, including Robert Benchley, Alexander Woollcott, Ogden Nash, Peter Arno, Charles Addams, and Dorothy Parker. But no one could have written about this irascible, eccentric genius more affectionately or more critically than James Thurber, whose portrait of Ross captures not only a complex literary giant but a historic friendship and a glorious era as well. If you get Ross down on paper, warned Wolcott Gibbs to Thurber, nobody will ever believe it. But readers of this unforgettable memoir will find that they do.
Offering a peek into the lives of two American literary giants and the New York literary scene at its heyday, The Years with Ross is a true classic, and a testament to the enduring influence of their genius.
About the Author
James Thurber (1894-1961) created some thirty volumes of humor, fiction, children's books, cartoons, and essays in just about as many years. A founding member of The New Yorker staff, Thurber wrote and illustrated such enduring books as The Thurber Carnival and My Life and Hard Times, which have appeared in countless editions and dozens of languages throughout the world.