SOURCE: "New Leaders: The Missionaries," in Magazines in the Twentieth Century, second edition, University of Illinois Press, 1964, pp. 223-61.

Peterson is an American educator and critic who has written numerous works on magazines and journalism. In the following excerpt, he traces the growth of the New Yorker from its origin through 1964.

As Time Inc. expanded into a global operation and took the world for its beat, another missionary was deliberately cultivating a relatively small following and was focusing his editorial attention on a single city. Harold Ross and his New Yorker kept their eyes on New York; and although they regularly peered across the ocean at Europe and occasionally looked across the United States at Hollywood, they largely ignored the America west of the Hudson. Yet Ross's New Yorker was an influential magazine. It changed the character of American humor, introduced a new approach to magazine biography, set...