The ungainly figure of Harold Ross has played a leading role
in a number of memoirs. Notable among these are James Thurber’s
The Years with Ross (1957), an amusing account of The New Yorker’s
early days, and Brendan Gill’s Here at “The New Yorker” (1975); Gill,
unlike Thurber, was unsentimental about Ross, indeed frequently acid,
but he didn’t underestimate the founding editor’s
contribution to the magazine’s success. Ross, “The New Yorker,” and
Me (1968) was written by Ross’s first wife, Jane Grant, who managed
to make a dull book out of a fascinating subject. Ross also made
an appearance in Wolcott Gibbs’s 1950 play, Season in the Sun,
whose stage directions insultingly suggested that the actor playing
the Ross part should be able to play Caliban or Mr. Hyde “almost
without the assistance of stage makeup.”

But oddly enough there has been until now no actual biography
of Ross, though the forty years since his death have only confirmed
his position as the most influential magazine editor of this
century. Thomas Kunkel, a newspaperman who has never before
written a book, has rectified the situation with a sympathetic,
entertaining, and informative study, Genius in Disguise: Harold Ross
of “The New Yorker.”
As his title suggests, Kunkel writes with a
mission: to dig Ross, the real Ross, out from under the avalanche
of anecdotes that have obscured his talents and made him out to be
a charming but absurd “character,” a Colorado rube who had no