Man into Magazine

If you were born any time after February 1925, there has never been a week in your lifetime when you could not have bought a copy of The New Yorker. Thirty-five years multiplied by fifty-two weeks means well over eighteen hundred Thursdays, and on every one of them The New Yorker has imparted its tirelessly nimble and safely ironic view of the world-at-large. Unconcerned with “news,” or “opinion,” it has nevertheless editorialized as extensively and persuasively as any organ ever printed in English, and when future professors generalize on our American culture and its forms of wishful thinking, they will find no surer index of detail than its immaculately groomed pages.

But if they ever become curious about the man who conceived and embodied those pages, they will have to read James Thurber’s affectionate but shrewd portrait in The Years with Ross (Atlantic-Little, Brown, $5.00). It is not a biography. The years in the title are Thurber’s own, in which along with many illustrious others, he was outraged, overwhelmed, pampered and fascinated by the most exciting editor on record. “He was married three times to women, and once to The New Yorker,” says Mr. Thurber, and his book is about the fourth—or first—of these marriages, a final and absolute and consuming one which Ross served up to the last day of his life.

RP

About the Author

Robert Phelps

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If you were born any time after February 1925, there has never been a week in your lifetime when you could not have bought a copy of The New Yorker. Thirty-five years multiplied by fifty-two weeks means well over eighteen hundred Thursdays, and on every one of them The New Yorker has imparted its tirelessly nimble and safely ironic view of the world-at-large. Unconcerned with “news,” or “opinion,” it has nevertheless editorialized as extensively and persuasively as any organ ever printed in English, and when future professors generalize on our American culture and its forms of wishful thinking, they will find no surer index of detail than its immaculately groomed pages.

But if they ever become curious about the man who conceived and embodied those pages, they will have to read James Thurber’s affectionate but shrewd portrait in The Years with Ross (Atlantic-Little, Brown, $5.00). It is not a biography. The years in the title are Thurber’s own, in which along with many illustrious others, he was outraged, overwhelmed, pampered and fascinated by the most exciting editor on record. “He was married three times to women, and once to The New Yorker,” says Mr. Thurber, and his book is about the fourth—or first—of these marriages, a final and absolute and consuming one which Ross served up to the last day of his life.