Harold Ross

"... I fuss around with commas, semi-colons, dictionaries, and wordings, and it drives me crazy. I am too virile. I ought to be building subways. I was thinking of going to the with the but that would take a year or two and I can spare, at most, only two months. It probably would be a bore anyhow. All life is a bore if you think at all...."

"The New Yorker had an interest in publishing any writer that could turn in a good piece. It read everything submitted. Hemingway, Faulkner, and the others were well established and well paid when The New Yorker came on the scene. The magazine would have been glad to publish them, but it didn’t have the money to pay them off, and for the most part they didn’t submit. They were selling to The Saturday Evening Post and other well-heeled publications, and in general were not inclined to contribute to the small, new, impecunious weekly. Also, some of them, I would guess, did not feel sympathetic to The New Yorker’s frivolity. Ross had no great urge to publish the big names; he was far more interested in turning up new and yet undiscovered talent, the s and the s. We did publish some things by —“Only the Dead Know Brooklyn” was one. I believe we published something by Fitzgerald. But Ross didn’t waste much time trying to corral “emerged” writers. He was looking for the ones that were found by turning over a stone."