Like so many figures who come to be enshrined as “quintessentially New York,” Harold Ross, the founder and first editor of this magazine, was an outsider who arrived in the big city nursing an ambition. Ross was born in Aspen and grew up in Salt Lake City. At the age of thirteen, he dropped out of school, and before long he was bouncing around newsrooms from Hoboken to Panama City. An odd-looking man with widely spaced teeth and a porcupine-ish pompadour, he made his journalistic bones during the First World War, in Paris, editing Stars & Stripes. In 1919, he washed up in the dawning Jazz Age of New York, the city of Babe Ruth and Langston Hughes, Ratner’s and the Cotton Club.
In 1924, Ross sent around a prospectus to would-be investors and readers, saying that his invention, The New Yorker, would be a “reflection in word and picture of metropolitan life. It will be human. Its general tenor will be one of gaiety, wit, and satire, but it will be more than a jester.”
And so on, for pages. In large measure, Ross was guessing out loud. His formula of reporting, fiction, poetry, criticism, cartoons, and art would not fully settle into place until the next war. When the magazine was launched, in February, 1925, it published some sparkling voices—Robert Benchley, E. B. White, James Thurber, Dorothy Parker—but it barely made it to 1926. It was, Thurber wrote later, in “The Years with Ross,” “the outstanding flop of 1925, a year of memorable successes in literature, music, and entertainment.” Circulation went from an initial print run of fifteen thousand to a low of twenty-seven hundred. One night, Ross, desperate for copy, turned to Parker. “I thought you were coming into the office to write a piece last week,” he said. “What happened?” Parker replied that she couldn’t carry out the assignment. “Somebody was using the pencil,” she explained.
Ross subsisted on nicotine, coffee, and nerves. The hours he kept were horrible, and his three marriages failed. But he fulfilled his dream. The New Yorker found its footing during the Depression. And although the magazine began to venture far beyond midtown with the start of the Second World War, the city remained an essential terra firma, a spirit and a home.
This week, while we digest one holiday and prepare for more, we’ve decided to open the archive and republish a sampling of New York stories, New York essays, New York poems, and New York drawings. There’s even a classic New York cover, by the Mexican artist Matías Santoyo. All the pieces you’ll find in this issue, fiction and nonfiction, are set in the city, and all are deeply personal.
Some come with a notable backstory, too. Take James Baldwin’s “Letter from a Region in My Mind,” which was published here, in 1962, and then became the heart of “The Fire Next Time.” In 1959, William Shawn, Ross’s successor as editor, asked Baldwin to write about an extended trip he was taking to Africa with his sister. A few years earlier, Norman Podhoretz, the editor of Commentary, had asked Baldwin to write about his early life in the city. Baldwin failed to complete the Africa essay, but he did write a piece about his childhood in Harlem, which evolved into a longer exploration of religion, race, and the Nation of Islam. He gave it to Shawn. Podhoretz never quite forgave Baldwin, Shawn, or The New Yorker.
Ross, in the end, had been surprised by the depth that his creation—a “fifteen-cent comic paper”—had taken on. Just before he died, in 1951, he wrote to a friend, “I started to get out a light magazine that wouldn’t concern itself with the weighty problems of the universe, and now look at me.” ♦
