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.
“To an ancient rememberer like me, the field of old-fashioned books and characters that could be beaten to death on television is a vast one, and includes, I am certain, hundreds that no television executive ever read or heard about.”
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.
“Let me, in conclusion, assure the distraught hostess that some of my best friends are writers, and adjure her, for God’s sake, not to bring them and me together at a party at her house.”
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.