Today’s the day, ninety years ago to be exact, when the new weekly mentioned above turned up on newsstands across Manhattan. The cover, by Rea Irvin, was surprising. It featured a drawing of an as yet unnamed gentleman from an earlier time. How odd, how very strange. Who is that fellow, and why did The New Yorker’s founder and first
Read moreTag: Harold Ross
Regan Arts to Publish Maslin Peter Arno Biography, Mad At Something
I’m pleased to announce that Mad At Something, my biography of the late and very great New Yorker cartoonist, Peter Arno will be published by Regan Arts. Arno is one of the pillars of The New Yorker‘s earliest days, a group that includes Harold Ross, E.B. White, Katharine White, and James Thurber. Ross, the magazine’s founder and first
Read moreHarold Ross’s Caption Contest
Less than a year before Harold Ross published the very first issue of his brainchild, The New Yorker, he briefly edited a well-established humor magazine, Judge. I recently bought a copy of the Ross period Judge to see what I could see (it’s the issue of July 19, 1924). it was odd, but of course not unexpected, to
Read moreHarold Ross & “Specific People” New Yorker Covers
I was leafing through Thomas Kunkel’s book, Letters From the Editor (the Editor: The New Yorker’s founder and first editor, Harold Ross) when I came upon the one letter in the book to Rea Irvin (Irvin was The New Yorker’s art consultant from the magazine’s inception through 1952). Written in May
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