From iconic American humorist James
Thurber, a celebrated and poignant memoir about his years at The New Yorker with
the magazine’s unforgettable founder and longtime editor, Harold Ross
“Extremely entertaining. . . . life
at The New Yorker emerges as a lovely sort of pageant of lunacy, of practical
jokes, of feuds and foibles. It is an affectionate picture of scamps playing their
games around a man who, for all his brusqueness, loved them, took care of them,
pampered and scolded them like an irascible mother hen.” —New York Times
With a foreword by Adam Gopnik and
illustrations by James Thurber
At
the helm of America’s most influential literary magazine from 1925 to 1951,
Harold Ross introduced the country to a host of exciting talent, including Robert
Benchley, Alexander Woollcott, Ogden Nash, Peter Arno, Charles Addams, and
Dorothy Parker. But no one could have written about this irascible, eccentric genius
more affectionately or more critically than James Thurber, whose portrait of
Ross captures not only a complex literary giant but a historic friendship and a
glorious era as well. "If you get Ross down on paper," warned Wolcott
Gibbs to Thurber," nobody will ever believe it." But readers of this
unforgettable memoir will find that they do.
Offering
a peek into the lives of two American literary giants and the New York literary
scene at its heyday, The Years with Ross is a true classic, and a
testament to the enduring influence of their genius.
