'How could a man who looked like a resident of the Ozarks and talked like a saloon bar brawler set himself up as pilot of a sophisticated, elegant magazine?' This was Ben Hecht's way of phrasing the Big Question about Harold Ross, the question that was asked repeatedly throughout Ross's twenty-five years in charge of the New Yorker, and is still sometimes asked today: how did he do it? Or rather (Ross loathed italics), how was that done by him? - 'that' being the last word in journalistic chic and 'him' being, well, just look at him: a Colorado bum.

LRB 8 June 1995 | PDF Download