There shouldn’t be a licence to get things wrong
Ian Hamilton
- Genius in Disguise: Harold Ross of the ‘New Yorker’ by Thomas Kunkel
Random House, 497 pp, $25.00, March 1995, ISBN 0 679 41837 7
‘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.
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