Literary in its tone, mainstream in its scope and shot through with biting humor, The New Yorker brought a new – and necessary – sophistication to American journalism when it was launched a hundred years ago, in February 1925. In conducting my research on the history of American journalism for my book Covering America – A Narrative History of a Nation’s Journalism (published in February 2018), I became passionate about the story of the birth of the magazine and that of its founder, Harold Ross.
Harold Ross fit easily into a media environment teeming with strong personalities. He had never completed high school. Divorced several times and plagued by ulcers, he permanently displayed a smile with sparse teeth and characteristic crew-cut hair. He devoted his entire adult life to one business: The New Yorker magazine.
For scholars, by scholars
Born in 1892 in Aspen, Colorado, Harold Ross worked as a reporter in the West while still a teenager. When the United States entered World War I, he enlisted.
Sent to the south of France, he quickly deserted and went to Paris, taking with him his portable Corona typewriter. He then joined the fledgling soldiers’ newspaper, the Stars and Stripes, which was so short of qualified staff that Harold Ross was hired without question, even though the paper was an official army publication.
In Paris, Harold Ross met several writers, including Jane Grant (1892-1972), the first woman to work as a reporter for the New York Times. She later became the first of his three wives.
After the armistice in November 1918, Harold Ross left for New York and never really left. There, he met other writers and quickly joined a circle of critics, playwrights and brilliant minds who gathered around the Round Table at the Algonquin Hotel, on 44e West Street in Manhattan.
During endless and copiously watered lunches, Harold Ross frequented and exchanged witticisms with some of the most brilliant figures of the New York literary world. From these meetings was also born a long-term poker game in which Harold Ross and the man who would become his future financial backer, Raoul Fleischmann, from the famous yeast-producing family, took part.
In the mid-1920s, Harold Ross decided to launch a weekly magazine devoted to metropolitan New York life. He could see that the magazine press was experiencing considerable growth, but had no desire to imitate what already existed. He wanted to publish a newspaper that would speak directly to him and his friends, young city dwellers who had spent time in Europe and were tired of the platitudes and conventional columns that filled most American periodicals.
But first of all, Harold Ross had to establish a business plan. The type of cultured readers he was targeting also interested New York department stores, who saw an ideal clientele and expressed their willingness to buy advertising inserts. On this basis, Harold Ross’s poker partner, Raoul Fleischmann, agreed to advance him $25,000 to get started, the equivalent of about $450,000 today.
Harold Ross goes all in
In the fall of 1924, moved to an office owned by the Fleischmann family at 25 West 45th Street, Harold Ross set to work on the brochure for his magazine: “The New Yorker will reflect, in words and images, metropolitan life. He will be human. His general tone will be one of mirth, wit and satire, but he will be more than just a buffoon. He will not be what we commonly call radical or intellectual. It will be what we usually call sophisticated, in that it will assume in its readers a reasonable degree of open-mindedness. He will hate nonsense.”
Much of the magazine’s success was due to Harold Ross’s genius for spotting talent and encouraging them to develop their own voices.
Harold Ross added this now famous phrase: “The magazine is not designed for the old lady in Dubuque.” In other words, the New Yorker would neither seek to keep up with current events nor to flatter middle America. Harold Ross’s only criterion would be the interest of a subject and it was he alone who would decide what deserved to be considered interesting. He bet everything on the idea, daring and improbable, that there were enough readers sharing his tastes – or likely to discover them – to sustain a weekly that was at once elegant, impertinent and full of wit.
Harold Ross almost failed. The cover of the first issue of The New Yorker, dated February 21, 1925, showed no portraits of powerful people or industrial tycoons, no catchy headlines, no flashy promises. Instead, it presented a watercolor by Rea Irvin, an artist friend of Harold Ross, representing a dandy character attentively observing – what an idea! – a butterfly through his monocle. This image, nicknamed Eustace Tilley, became the unofficial emblem of the magazine.
The magazine finds its balance
Inside this first issue, the reader discovered an assortment of jokes and short poems. There was also a portrait, reviews of plays and books, lots of gossip and a few advertisements.
The whole thing wasn’t particularly impressive, giving more of a patchwork feel. The magazine had difficulty getting started. Just a few months after its creation, Harold Ross even almost lost everything during a drunken poker game with Herbert Bayard Swope, winner of the first Pulitzer Prize for reporting and a regular on the Round Table. He did not return home until midday the next day and when his wife searched his pockets, she found IOUs totaling nearly $30,000.
Raoul Fleischmann, who had also participated in the poker game, but had left at a reasonable hour, flew into a rage. No one knows how, but Harold Ross managed to convince him to settle part of his debt and let him repay the rest through his work. Just in time, the New Yorker began to gain readers, soon followed by new advertisers. Harold Ross ends up paying his debts to his guardian angel.
Much of the magazine’s success was due to Harold Ross’s genius for spotting talent and encouraging them to develop their own voices. One of his first major discoveries was Katharine S. Angell, who became the magazine’s first fiction editor and a constant source of good advice. In 1926, Harold Ross recruited James Thurber and EB White, who performed a variety of tasks: writing “casual” (short satirical essays), drawing caricatures, writing captions for other people’s drawings, reporting for the “Talk of the Town” section and various comments.
As The New Yorker found stability, editors and writers began to perfect some of its trademarks: the in-depth profile, ideally devoted to someone who wasn’t in the news but deserved to be better known; long non-fiction stories fueled by in-depth investigations; short stories and poetry; and of course, the one-panel cartoons, as well as the comic strips.
With his insatiable curiosity and maniacal perfectionism when it came to grammar, Harold Ross would do anything to ensure accuracy. Authors received their manuscripts covered in penciled notes demanding dates, sources, and endless factual checks. One of his most typical annotations was: “Who “he”?” (“Who is “he”?”).
“Never leave me alone with poets.” — Harold Ross, editor-in-chief of The New Yorker, 1925-51. pic.twitter.com/2rbwP2J8io
— John Connolly (@jconnollybooks) September 15, 2025
During the 1930s, when the country was going through a relentless economic crisis, the New Yorker was sometimes criticized for its apparent indifference to the seriousness of the nation’s problems. In its pages, life almost always seemed light, attractive and pleasant.
It was during the Second World War that the New Yorker truly found its place, both financially and editorially. He ends up discovering his own voice: curious, open to the world, demanding and, ultimately, deeply serious.
Harold Ross also discovered new authors, including AJ Liebling, Mollie Panter-Downes and John Hersey, whom he poached from Henry Luce’s Time magazine. Together they produced some of the greatest texts of the period, including John Hersey’s seminal report on the use of the first atomic bomb in conflict, published in August 1946.
A gem of journalism
Over the past century, the New Yorker has had a profound impact on American journalism. On the one hand, Harold Ross knew how to create the conditions allowing singular voices to be heard. On the other hand, the magazine provided space and encouragement for a form of non-academic authority: a place where enlightened amateurs could write articles on the Dead Sea Scrolls, geology, medicine or nuclear war, with no other legitimacy than their ability to observe carefully, reason with clarity and construct a fair sentence.
Finally, we must recognize Harold Ross for having broadened the field of journalism well beyond the traditional categories of crime, justice, politics or sport. In the pages of this magazine, readers almost never found what they could read elsewhere. Instead, New Yorker readers could discover just about everything else there.
