HAROLD W. ROSS, JANE GRANT & 'THE NEW YORKER'

Today, The Grandma has been reading The New Yorker, an American weekly magazine featuring journalism, commentary, criticism, essays, fiction, satire, cartoons, and poetry created by Harold Ross and Jane Grant.

Harold Wallace Ross (November 6, 1892-December 6, 1951) was an American journalist who co-founded The New Yorker magazine in 1925 with his wife Jane Grant, and was its editor-in-chief until his death.

Born in a prospector's cabin in Aspen, Colorado, Ross was the son of Scots-Irish immigrant miner George Ross and schoolteacher Ida (Martin) Ross. When he was eight, the family left Aspen because of the collapse in the price of silver, moving to Redcliff and Silverton, Colorado, then to Salt Lake City, Utah.

In Utah, he worked on the high school paper (The West High Red & Black) and was a stringer for The Salt Lake Tribune, the city's leading daily newspaper. He dropped out of school at 13 and ran away to his uncle in Denver, where he worked for The Denver Post. Though he returned to his family, he did not return to school, instead getting a job at the Salt Lake Telegram, a smaller afternoon daily newspaper.

By the time he was 25 he had worked for at least seven different papers, including the Marysville, California Appeal; the Sacramento Union; the Panama Star and Herald; the New Orleans Item; the Atlanta Journal, the Hoboken, New Jersey Hudson Observer; the Brooklyn Eagle; and the San Francisco Call.

In Atlanta, he covered the murder trial of Leo Frank, one of the trials of the century.

In World War I, he enlisted in the U.S. Army Eighteenth Engineers Railway Regiment. In France, he edited the regimental journal and went to Paris to work for the Stars and Stripes, serving from February 1918 to April 1919. He claimed to have walked 150 miles to reach Paris to write for Stars and Stripes, where he met Alexander Woollcott, Cyrus Baldridge, Franklin Pierce Adams, and Jane Grant, who would become his first wife and helped back The New Yorker.

After the war, he returned to New York City and assumed the editorship of a magazine for veterans, The Home Sector. It folded in 1920 and was absorbed by the American Legion Weekly. He then spent a few months at Judge, a humor magazine.

More information: The New Yorker publishes his first issue in 1925

Jane Grant (May 29, 1892-March 16, 1972) was a New York City journalist who co-founded The New Yorker with her first husband, Harold Ross.

Jane Grant was born Jeanette Cole Grant in Joplin, Missouri, and grew up and went to school in Girard, Kansas. Grant originally trained to be a vocalist. She came to New York City at 16 to pursue singing, but fell into journalism when she joined the staff of The New York Times in the society department.

She soon worked her way into the city room as a reporter and became close friends with the critic Alexander Woollcott. As a journalist for the Times (its first full-fledged woman reporter), she covered women's issues, questioning public figures about their views on the status of women and interviewing women who worked in traditionally male professions. She wrote for the Times for 15 years.

During World War I, Grant, who was also a talented singer and dancer, talked her way onto a troopship to France by joining the entertainment with the YMCA. She joined the American Red Cross and entertained soldiers during shows in Paris and at camps. In France, Woollcott introduced her to the future Vicious Circle members, including Harold Ross. 

Grant and Ross married in 1920. The Vicious Circle later became the Algonquin Round Table. She returned to the Times after the war.

In 1921, Grant joined the Lucy Stone League, which was dedicated, in the manner of Lucy Stone, to helping women keep their maiden names after marriage, as Grant did after her two marriages.

In 1950, Grant and 22 former members restarted the Lucy Stone League; its first meeting was on 22 Mar 1950 in New York City. That year Grant won the Census Bureau's agreement that a married woman could use her birth surname as her official or real name in the census.

Grant was one of the founding members of the New York Newspaper Women's Club and served on its first board of directors after incorporation in 1924.

With the backing of Raoul Fleischmann, Grant and Ross established The New Yorker in 1925. As editor, Ross is credited with driving the success of the magazine, however Ross is quoted saying the magazine would not have been a success without Jane's contribution. Grant was chiefly a business and content consultant for the magazine and initially helped to gather investments towards starting the magazine.

She brought her friend Janet Flanner into the magazine's coterie of correspondents, commissioning her enduring Letter from Paris column. The feature continues to be published today, although it now includes many other cities. Grant later produced a special overseas issue for the armed forces during World War II.

During World War II, Grant wrote for several magazines, including Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine and The New Yorker.

Grant wrote Confession of a Feminist for American Mercury in 1943. In the essay, she describes the experience of being a feminist, recounting her early career as a woman reporter among men for the Times and exploring discriminatory laws and practices.

Grant continued to be active in feminist causes, reactivating the Lucy Stone League and expanding its purpose. She continued to work for the rights of women into the 1960s, advocating for passage of the Equal Rights Amendment and serving on the National Council of Women.

In 1939, she married William B. Harris, the editor of Fortune magazine. She and Harris moved from Manhattan to Litchfield, Connecticut. The couple founded White Flower Farm out of a barn on their property. In the 1950s, they started a successful mail-order business for home gardening.

In 1968, Grant published a memoir about her life entitled Ross, The New Yorker and Me (Reynal and Co., 1968 New York City). She was encouraged to do so by her second husband, William Harris, and ultimately dedicated the book to him.

Grant died in 1972 on the Connecticut farm she shared with her husband. Harris sold the nursery to Eliot Wadsworth in 1976.

More information: The New York Public Library

 Woody Allen's movies are so much a part of me.
I grew up watching them over
and over and would read
all his comic pieces for the New Yorker.

Noah Baumbach

HAROLD W. ROSS, JANE GRANT & 'THE NEW YORKER'

Today, The Grandma has been reading The New Yorker, an American weekly magazine featuring journalism, commentary, criticism, essays, fiction, satire, cartoons, and poetry created by Harold Ross and Jane Grant.

Harold Wallace Ross (November 6, 1892-December 6, 1951) was an American journalist who co-founded The New Yorker magazine in 1925 with his wife Jane Grant, and was its editor-in-chief until his death.

Born in a prospector's cabin in Aspen, Colorado, Ross was the son of Scots-Irish immigrant miner George Ross and schoolteacher Ida (Martin) Ross. When he was eight, the family left Aspen because of the collapse in the price of silver, moving to Redcliff and Silverton, Colorado, then to Salt Lake City, Utah.

In Utah, he worked on the high school paper (The West High Red & Black) and was a stringer for The Salt Lake Tribune, the city's leading daily newspaper. He dropped out of school at 13 and ran away to his uncle in Denver, where he worked for The Denver Post. Though he returned to his family, he did not return to school, instead getting a job at the Salt Lake Telegram, a smaller afternoon daily newspaper.

By the time he was 25 he had worked for at least seven different papers, including the Marysville, California Appeal; the Sacramento Union; the Panama Star and Herald; the New Orleans Item; the Atlanta Journal, the Hoboken, New Jersey Hudson Observer; the Brooklyn Eagle; and the San Francisco Call.

In Atlanta, he covered the murder trial of Leo Frank, one of the trials of the century.

In World War I, he enlisted in the U.S. Army Eighteenth Engineers Railway Regiment. In France, he edited the regimental journal and went to Paris to work for the Stars and Stripes, serving from February 1918 to April 1919. He claimed to have walked 150 miles to reach Paris to write for Stars and Stripes, where he met Alexander Woollcott, Cyrus Baldridge, Franklin Pierce Adams, and Jane Grant, who would become his first wife and helped back The New Yorker.

After the war, he returned to New York City and assumed the editorship of a magazine for veterans, The Home Sector. It folded in 1920 and was absorbed by the American Legion Weekly. He then spent a few months at Judge, a humor magazine.

More information: The New Yorker publishes his first issue in 1925

Jane Grant (May 29, 1892-March 16, 1972) was a New York City journalist who co-founded The New Yorker with her first husband, Harold Ross.

Jane Grant was born Jeanette Cole Grant in Joplin, Missouri, and grew up and went to school in Girard, Kansas. Grant originally trained to be a vocalist. She came to New York City at 16 to pursue singing, but fell into journalism when she joined the staff of The New York Times in the society department.

She soon worked her way into the city room as a reporter and became close friends with the critic Alexander Woollcott. As a journalist for the Times (its first full-fledged woman reporter), she covered women's issues, questioning public figures about their views on the status of women and interviewing women who worked in traditionally male professions. She wrote for the Times for 15 years.

During World War I, Grant, who was also a talented singer and dancer, talked her way onto a troopship to France by joining the entertainment with the YMCA. She joined the American Red Cross and entertained soldiers during shows in Paris and at camps. In France, Woollcott introduced her to the future Vicious Circle members, including Harold Ross. 

Grant and Ross married in 1920. The Vicious Circle later became the Algonquin Round Table. She returned to the Times after the war.

In 1921, Grant joined the Lucy Stone League, which was dedicated, in the manner of Lucy Stone, to helping women keep their maiden names after marriage, as Grant did after her two marriages.

In 1950, Grant and 22 former members restarted the Lucy Stone League; its first meeting was on 22 Mar 1950 in New York City. That year Grant won the Census Bureau's agreement that a married woman could use her birth surname as her official or real name in the census.

Grant was one of the founding members of the New York Newspaper Women's Club and served on its first board of directors after incorporation in 1924.

With the backing of Raoul Fleischmann, Grant and Ross established The New Yorker in 1925. As editor, Ross is credited with driving the success of the magazine, however Ross is quoted saying the magazine would not have been a success without Jane's contribution. Grant was chiefly a business and content consultant for the magazine and initially helped to gather investments towards starting the magazine.

She brought her friend Janet Flanner into the magazine's coterie of correspondents, commissioning her enduring Letter from Paris column. The feature continues to be published today, although it now includes many other cities. Grant later produced a special overseas issue for the armed forces during World War II.

During World War II, Grant wrote for several magazines, including Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine and The New Yorker.

Grant wrote Confession of a Feminist for American Mercury in 1943. In the essay, she describes the experience of being a feminist, recounting her early career as a woman reporter among men for the Times and exploring discriminatory laws and practices.

Grant continued to be active in feminist causes, reactivating the Lucy Stone League and expanding its purpose. She continued to work for the rights of women into the 1960s, advocating for passage of the Equal Rights Amendment and serving on the National Council of Women.

In 1939, she married William B. Harris, the editor of Fortune magazine. She and Harris moved from Manhattan to Litchfield, Connecticut. The couple founded White Flower Farm out of a barn on their property. In the 1950s, they started a successful mail-order business for home gardening.

In 1968, Grant published a memoir about her life entitled Ross, The New Yorker and Me (Reynal and Co., 1968 New York City). She was encouraged to do so by her second husband, William Harris, and ultimately dedicated the book to him.

Grant died in 1972 on the Connecticut farm she shared with her husband. Harris sold the nursery to Eliot Wadsworth in 1976.

More information: The New York Public Library

 Woody Allen's movies are so much a part of me.
I grew up watching them over
and over and would read
all his comic pieces for the New Yorker.

Noah Baumbach

THE NEW YORKER PUBLISHES ITS FIRST ISSUE IN 1925

The New Yorker, February 21, 1925

The Grandma is relaxing at home after her travel to Brussels. She has been unpacking her suitcase and she has sit on her sofa to read a little about world news. She has chosen one of her favourite English newspapers, The New Yorker, a publication that published its first issue on a day like today in 1925.

The New Yorker is an American weekly magazine featuring journalism, commentary, criticism, essays, fiction, satire, cartoons, and poetry.

Started as a weekly in 1925, the magazine is now published 47 times annually, with five of these issues covering two-week spans.

Although its reviews and events listings often focus on the cultural life of New York City, The New Yorker has a wide audience outside New York and is read internationally. It is well known for its illustrated and often topical covers, its commentaries on popular culture and eccentric Americana, its attention to modern fiction by the inclusion of short stories and literary reviews, its rigorous fact checking and copy editing, its journalism on politics and social issues, and its single-panel cartoons sprinkled throughout each issue.

The New Yorker was founded by Harold Ross and his wife Jane Grant, a New York Times reporter, and debuted on February 21, 1925. Ross wanted to create a sophisticated humor magazine that would be different from perceivably corny" humor publications such as Judge, where he had worked, or the old Life.

More information: The New Yorker

Ross partnered with entrepreneur Raoul H. Fleischmann, who founded the General Baking Company, to establish the F-R Publishing Company. The magazine's first offices were at 25 West 45th Street in Manhattan. Ross edited the magazine until his death in 1951.

During the early, occasionally precarious years of its existence, the magazine prided itself on its cosmopolitan sophistication. Ross famously declared in a 1925 prospectus for the magazine: It has announced that it is not edited for the old lady in Dubuque.

More information: @NewYorker

Although the magazine never lost its touches of humor, it soon established itself as a pre-eminent forum for serious fiction, essays and journalism. Shortly after the end of World War II, John Hersey's essay Hiroshima filled an entire issue.

In subsequent decades the magazine published short stories by many of the most respected writers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, including Ann Beattie, Sally Benson, Truman Capote, John Cheever, Roald Dahl, Mavis Gallant, Geoffrey Hellman, Ruth McKenney, John McNulty, Joseph Mitchell, Alice Munro, Haruki Murakami, Vladimir Nabokov, John O'Hara, Dorothy Parker, S.J. Perelman, Philip Roth, J. D. Salinger, Irwin Shaw, James Thurber, John Updike, Eudora Welty, Stephen King, and E. B. White. Publication of Shirley Jackson's The Lottery drew more mail than any other story in the magazine's history.

The New Yorker, September 12, 1994

In its early decades, the magazine sometimes published two or even three short stories a week, but in recent years the pace has remained steady at one story per issue.

While some styles and themes recur more often than others in its fiction, the stories are marked less by uniformity than by variety, and they have ranged from Updike's introspective domestic narratives to the surrealism of Donald Barthelme, and from parochial accounts of the lives of neurotic New Yorkers to stories set in a wide range of locations and eras and translated from many languages.

Kurt Vonnegut said that The New Yorker has been an effective instrument for getting a large audience to appreciate modern literature.

The magazine is notable for its editorial traditions. Under the rubric Profiles, it publishes articles about notable people such as Ernest Hemingway, Henry R. Luce and Marlon Brando, Hollywood restaurateur Michael Romanoff, magician Ricky Jay and mathematicians David and Gregory Chudnovsky.

Other enduring features have been Goings on About Town, a listing of cultural and entertainment events in New York, and The Talk of the Town, a miscellany of brief pieces -frequently humorous, whimsical or eccentric vignettes of life in New York- written in a breezily light style, or feuilleton, although in recent years the section often begins with a serious commentary.

More information: The New Yorker

For many years, newspaper snippets containing amusing errors, unintended meanings or badly mixed metaphors (Block That Metaphor) have been used as filler items, accompanied by a witty retort. There is no masthead listing the editors and staff. Despite some changes, the magazine has kept much of its traditional appearance over the decades in typography, layout, covers and artwork. The magazine was acquired by Advance Publications, the media company owned by Samuel Irving Newhouse Jr, in 1985, for $200 million when it was earning less than $6 million a year.

As far back as the 1940s, the magazine's commitment to fact-checking was already well-known. However, the magazine played a role in a literary scandal and defamation lawsuit over two articles written by Janet Malcolm in the 1990s, who wrote about Sigmund Freud's legacy. Questions were raised about the magazine's fact-checking process.

More information: The Legacy Lab

As of 2010, The New Yorker employs sixteen fact checkers. In July 2011, the magazine was sued for defamation in United States district court for an article written by David Grann on July 12, 2010, but the case was summarily dismissed. Today, the magazine is often identified as the leading publication for rigorous fact checking.

Since the late 1990s, The New Yorker has used the Internet to publish current and archived material, and maintains a website with some content from the current issue, plus exclusive web-only content. Subscribers have access to the full current issue online, as well as a complete archive of back issues viewable as they were originally printed. 

The New Yorker, April 17, 2017

In addition, The New Yorker's cartoons are available for purchase online. A digital archive of back issues from 1925 to April 2008, representing more than 4,000 issues and half a million pages, has also been issued on DVD-ROMs and on a small portable hard drive. More recently, an iPad version of the current issue of the magazine has been released.

The New Yorker has featured cartoons, usually gag cartoons, since it began publication in 1925.

The cartoon editor of The New Yorker for years was Lee Lorenz, who first began cartooning in 1956 and became a New Yorker contract contributor in 1958.

After serving as the magazine's art editor from 1973 to 1993, when he was replaced by Françoise Mouly, he continued in the position of cartoon editor until 1998. His book The Art of the New Yorker: 1925–1995 (Knopf, 1995) was the first comprehensive survey of all aspects of the magazine's graphics.

In 1998, Robert Mankoff took over as cartoon editor and edited at least 14 collections of New Yorker cartoons. In addition, Mankoff usually contributed a short article to each book, describing some aspect of the cartooning process or the methods used to select cartoons for the magazine. Mankoff left the magazine in 2017.

More information: Literary Hub

The New Yorker's stable of cartoonists has included many important talents in American humor, including Charles Addams, Peter Arno, Charles Barsotti, George Booth, Roz Chast, Tom Cheney, Sam Cobean, Leo Cullum, Richard Decker, Pia Guerra, J. B. Handelsman, Helen E. Hokinson, Ed Koren, Reginald Marsh, Mary Petty, George Price, Charles Saxon, David Snell, Otto Soglow, Saul Steinberg, William Steig, James Stevenson, Richard Taylor, James Thurber, Pete Holmes, Barney Tobey, and Gahan Wilson.

Many early New Yorker cartoonists did not caption their own cartoons. In his book The Years with Ross, Thurber describes the newspaper's weekly art meeting, where cartoons submitted over the previous week would be brought up from the mail room to be gone over by Ross, the editorial department, and a number of staff writers.

More information: CBS News

Cartoons often would be rejected or sent back to artists with requested amendments, while others would be accepted and captions written for them. Some artists hired their own writers; Helen Hokinson hired James Reid Parker in 1931.

Brendan Gill relates in his book Here at The New Yorker that at one point in the early 1940s, the quality of the artwork submitted to the magazine seemed to improve. It later was found out that the office boy, a teen-aged Truman Capote had been acting as a volunteer art editor, dropping pieces he didn't like down the far edge of his desk.

More information: Mag Culture

One of the nice things about 'The New Yorker' is

they let you write stories

that sometimes end up almost half a book.

David Grann