When The New Yorker first arrived on newsstands, a hundred years ago this week, it was hardly an instant sensation. Not only were the first issues of modest distinction and sales; Harold Ross, its founding editor, nearly lost the whole flimsy enterprise in an all-night poker game.
Born in Aspen, Colorado, the son of a silver miner and a schoolteacher, Ross was a restless character—a rawboned, gap-toothed young man out of the pages of Mark Twain or Bret Harte. Starting when he ran away from home, at the age of fourteen, he worked at a long string of newspapers—from Sacramento to Panama—and, during the First World War, served his country in Europe as a uniformed editor for Stars & Stripes. Just before the Armistice, Ross met a reporter named Jane Grant, who eventually agreed to marry him despite regarding him as “the homeliest man I’d ever met.”
Ross arrived in Jazz Age Manhattan as yet another out-of-towner with an inchoate sense of ambition. He and Grant settled in Hell’s Kitchen, not far from the piers on the Hudson. One idea that occurred to them was to start a paper filled with shipping news. Another was to publish a line of paperback books. Or maybe they’d start some sort of humor magazine. Maybe that!
In the meantime, in March, 1924, Ross joined the editorial staff of a lighthearted weekly called Judge. He and Grant, who was working at the Times, passed many nights at a regular card game on the third floor of the Algonquin Hotel, which came to be known as the Thanatopsis Literary and Inside Straight Club. Not everyone at the table was penniless. Grant encouraged Ross to buttonhole Raoul Fleischmann, who was the heir to a baking fortune yet bored with his lot. Ross first mentioned his shipping-news idea, but no amount of yeast would get Fleischmann to rise to that proposal. After hearing Ross’s notion of a metropolitan weekly, a “comic paper,” though, he ran the numbers—the economy was booming, the postal rates were cheap—and handed over twenty-five thousand dollars.
In the coming weeks, Ross, Grant, and their circle entertained a raft of names for their fledgling creation—Manhattan, New York Weekly, New York Life, Truth, Our Town—before another acquaintance, the Broadway press agent John Toohey, came up with The New Yorker. (Horace Greeley had published a weekly called The New-Yorker from 1834 to 1841, but no one seemed to mind.) At home, Ross and Grant looked for inspiration by riffling through piles of magazines both defunct and funct: Gleason’s, The Smart Set, The American Mercury, Harper’s Weekly. They admired the comic tone of Puck and Punch. They were wary of imitating Vanity Fair, which was publishing Djuna Barnes and Aldous Huxley: too highbrow.