TILLEY WAS A WESTERNER
In the
United States, weather moves from west to east, while culture
generally travels from east to west. But in the case of The New
Yorker, culture moved with the weather. The New Yorker was created
by a Westerner – Harold Ross, a Coloradan from Aspen, when Aspen
was a mining town in the late 19th century. His family was driven
out of town by the silver bust of 1893, and thereafter Ross grew up
in Salt Lake City, Denver, and San Francisco. The Aspen house was
still there in 1991, a $35,000 teardown on a $675,000 lot,
according to Thomas Kunkel, author of Genius in Disguise: Harold
Ross of The New Yorker. Kunkel’s book arrives just as The New
Yorker that Ross established by grit, genius and integrity is
threatened by stock promotion stories on Seagrams and photos of the
O.J. Simpson set. There are still glints in today’s New Yorker of
the magazine Ross and his first wife, Jane Grant, began publishing
on Feb. 17, 1925. But to understand what the magazine once was,
read Kunkel. Bylines were at the ends of articles because the point
was the writing and content, not big-name authors. Tables of
contents were sketchy because Ross wanted readers to discover each
issue for themselves. The writing was free of four-letter words and
sexual innuendoes – he rejected even such titles as “The lay of the
land’ – because Ross never shed the standards his schoolteacher
mother and miner father had given him. And publisher Raoul
Fleisch-mann was barred from the editorial part of the building to
prevent advertising from influencing content. Ross was
unreasonable, perhaps an extremist. As a result, The New Yorker for
decades was the best magazine in the country: Rachel Carson’s
Silent Spring, for example, first ran in the magazine, as did John
Hersey’s Hiroshima. The 497-page book is $25 in hardback from
Random House, New York.
* Ed
Marston
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Tilley was a Westerner.
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