The New Yorker Launches: A New Era in Journalism

Harold Ross promised a magazine "not edited for the old lady in Dubuque." The first issue of The New Yorker had 32 pages and lost $8,000. Born on November 6, 1892, in Aspen, Colorado, Ross was a high school dropout who had edited Stars and Stripes during World War I, developing a sharp editorial instinct for clean prose and precise fact-checking. His wife, Jane Grant, a New York Times reporter, put up half the money for the magazine from her journalism salary. Raoul Fleischmann, heir to a yeast fortune, provided the rest. The debut issue appeared on February 21, 1925, and was unremarkable. The cover featured Eustace Tilley, a dandy examining a butterfly through a monocle, drawn by Rea Irvin. The image was intended as a one-time cover but became the magazine's symbol, reprinted on the anniversary issue nearly every year since. The New Yorker almost folded three times in its first year. Circulation was anemic, advertising sparse, and the content inconsistent. Ross was an obsessive editor who drove writers and staff to distraction with his marginal queries and demands for factual precision. He once wrote over 100 queries on a single manuscript. By 1935, the magazine was profitable. Ross had assembled a writing staff that would define American literary nonfiction for the next half-century: E.B. White, James Thurber, Joseph Mitchell, A.J. Liebling, and dozens of others. The magazine published John Hersey's "Hiroshima" in a single issue in 1946, devoting the entire editorial space to one article for the first and only time. It published Rachel Carson, Truman Capote, and Hannah Arendt. Ross died in 1951. The magazine has been published continuously for over 100 years without missing a single weekly issue.