Harold W. Ross (born November 6, 1892,Aspen,Colorado, U.S.—died December 6, 1951,Boston, Massachusetts) was the editor who founded and developedThe New Yorker, a weeklymagazine that from its birth in 1925 influenced American humour, fiction, and reportage.

Ross was somewhatelliptical about his past. When asked by an editor of theSaturday Evening Post for a biography, he wrote a seven-sentence letter that began “I was born in Aspen, Colorado” and ended “I knew this subject would come up sometime.” As a boy, he helped his father, who worked at several trades in the mining town of Aspen. With such chores as delivering beer to Aspen’s saloons and groceries to its red-light district, Harold saw a side of life that appealed to him in its surface easiness and disregard of the high-flown. In his later correspondence one can find such sentences as “I can’t give your love to Tony [owner of aNew Yorkspeakeasy] at the moment because he got raided last night.” Ross quithigh school to become a tramp reporter, and by the time he was 20 he haddone seriousnewspaper work in San Francisco,Panama,New Orleans, and Atlanta, among other places. When theUnited States enteredWorld War I, he enlisted and was sent toFrance. There he soon became the editor ofStars and Stripes, the U.S. serviceman’s newspaper.

With the financial backing of Raoul Fleischmann, a wealthy friend with whom he often played poker, Ross launchedThe New Yorker in 1925, and the magazine soon began to capture established writers away from the better-known magazineVanity Fair. Ross attracted talented young new writers and artists, who were drawn to the magazine by its innovative style and lucid sentences (Ross sometimes read H.W. Fowler’sModern English Usage for pleasure). In Ross’sThe New Yorker, the unknown writer was on equal footing with the established one; the editor sought goodwriting, not great names. Such writers asE.B. White andJames Thurber established their reputations as regular contributors to the magazine, as did the cartoonistsHelen Hokinson,Peter Arno, andCharles Addams. Among innumerable other contributors toThe New Yorker during Ross’s years wereDorothy Parker,H.L. Mencken,John Cheever,Rebecca West, andVladimir Nabokov. Ross remained the guiding force behind theThe New Yorker for 25 years, though he had relinquished many of his duties as editor toWilliam Shawn before his death from cancer in 1951.Letters from the Editor: The New Yorker’s Harold Ross (2000) is a selection of Ross’scogent and often witty correspondence with friends, writers, and the magazine staff.