The Talk of the Town - February 21, 2007

If Eustace Tilly himself had been searching for the unlikeliest person to edit a magazine about sophistication in New York, he couldn't have done much better than Harold Ross. 

Despite being a high-school dropout, Ross fell in with the Algonquin Round Table -- the group that defined American wit in the 1920s -- and used their talents to create a magazine that was "not edited for the old lady in Dubuque." 

Ross was the brain of The New Yorker, and its heart was E.B. White, whose clean prose informed the magazine's style, and whose influence spread far beyond Manhattan. 

Since its first issue, dated February 21, 1925, virtually every major American writer, photographer, or cartoonist -- James Thurber, John Updike, Dorothy Parker, John Hersey, Ring Lardner, Richard Avedon, R. Crumb, Joyce Carol Oates, Susan Orlean, Toni Morrison, Roz Chast, Charles Addams, and Truman Capote, and scores of others -- has appeared in the magazine's pages. So, on your 81st birthday, Mr. Tilley, we say to you anything except "the hell with it."

Suggested Sites...

The New Yorker - 81 years later, still the gold standard for American magazines. I Hate The New Yorker - well, maybe not the gold standard for everyone... Behind the Scenes at The New Yorker - the magazine spills the beans on itself. Harold Wallace Ross - the life and times of The New Yorker's father. Urban and Urbane - the 1930s, as seen from West 43rd Street.