A Century of The New Yorker

Founded 100 years ago today, that seminal American organ of taste, craft, wisdom, and discernment (and almost always several good laughs), The New Yorker.

The New Yorker was the innovative brainchild of editor Harold Ross. Born and raised around mining camps in Colorado and Utah, Ross was perhaps just the man to make a fetish out of New York sophistication. He worked his way east as a hard news reporter on a succession of small town newspapers, gradually ascending to bigger markets. In World War One, he found himself in Paris working for Stars and Stripes, and this is where he met Alexander Woollcott, FPA, and Jane Grant, who was to become his wife and partner in founding the magazine. He worked for several publications after the armistice, most notably the humor magazine Judge, whose corny tone offended him. Thus, with the backing of Raoul Fleischmann, of the yeast family, he founded The New Yorker.

Naturally we at Travalanche are fans of Ross’s stable of early contributors: so many of them made their mark on the American stage and screen in one way or another, or chronicled it in some way. In addition to the aforementioned Woollcott, there were Robert Benchley,Dorothy Parker, Marc Connelly, Edna Ferber, Ben Hecht, George S. Kaufman, Ring Lardner, Herman J. Mankiewicz,Joseph Moncure March, Don Marquis,Reginald Marsh, Groucho Marx, James Thurber, E.B. White, S.J. Perelman… F. Scott Fitzgerald also contributed to the magazine early in its life. There will be more from on that topic as we are fast approaching the centennial of The Great Gatsby.

Click those links above for my Travalanche posts on those creative people. Also be sure to check out the books of my friend Kevin Fitzpatrick, founder of The Dorothy Parker Society, and maven of all things Algonquin Roundtable. As I type this, he is preparing to give his New Yorker Centennial walking tour this morning. The temperature is 22 degrees Fahrenheit in New York, (feels like three), so I’m going to stay home and look at pictures.

By the way, it’s been my good fortune to have been featured within the pages of The New Yorker. There’s the big 2002 Adam Gopnick feature in which I am profiled, and me or my various projects have been mentioned at least a half dozen times over the decades in that “Goings On About Town” section. You definitely feel like you’re in the game when that happens. I’m also privileged to know some of the contributors, like Tony Millionaire, who once designed a postcard to promote one of my plays; and Drew Friedman, with whom I once shared a table at a book fair in Tom’s River, New Jersey. I learned that my old high school friend (and one time crush) Jhumpa Lahiri had made the big time when I found a copy of The New Yorker in a phone booth opened to one of her stories. That about gave me a heart attack.

Now, you’ve already missed my friend Kevin’s walking tour, but there is another way in which you can celebrate this New Yorker milestone. L’Alliance New York (formerly known as The French Institute) has an exhibition curated by the magazine’s art director Francoise Mouly that’s running through March 30. Called Covering The New Yorker (the same title as Mouly’s 2000 book), the show highlights scores of the magazine’s classic covers from over the decades. I hit it a couple of weeks ago with some good friends and it was a delight. Even better — it’s free. How’s that for a “Going On About Town”? Get the details here.

Also: opening at The New York Public Library Main Branch tomorrow (February 22) and remaining open through next year (February 21, 2026), the very similar sounding exhibitionA Century of the New Yorker, drawn from the NYPL’s own collections, also free. More here.