Genius in Disguise:: Harold Ross of the New Yorker

This marvelous, gossipy biography of Harold Ross (1892-1951), the Colorado silver prospector's son who founded the New Yorker in 1925 and made it into a bastion of literary excellence and East Coast urbanity, is as much a portrait of the man as a revealing chronicle of the magazine. Ross dropped out of high school in Salt Lake City to become an itinerant newspaper reporter. As a WWI private, he went AWOL in France and trekked to Paris, where he edited the U.S. Army's weekly newspaper Stars and Stripes. Kunkel, a former reporter for the Miami Herald and the New York Times, lays to rest the lingering legend of Ross as a perpetually confused hayseed who succeeded by dumb luck. We meet a man of glaring contradictions-profane and puritanical, a conservative presiding over a decidedly liberal magazine-whose keen intellect and searching curiosity nurtured such talents as E.B. White, Janet Flanner, John Cheever, Dorothy Parker, John O'Hara and James Thurber. Kunkel illuminates Ross's three failed marriages, his clashes with his protege and successor William Shawn, and his bitter feud with his partner, yeast magnate Raoul Fleischmann. Illustrations not seen by PW. (Mar.)