The first issue of the New Yorker magazine arrived on newsstands in February of 1925. The brainchild of an unlikely genius named Harold Ross, the periodical weathered a rocky start but soon established itself as a bastion of literacy, wit, and sophistication. A mixture of fact, fiction, poetry, and cartoons, the New Yorker set high standards in all four fields, despite the fact that founder/editor Ross himself had never completed high school. The first writers to set the tone for the magazine were E. B. White and James Thurber. Their sly, elegant wordplay enabled Ross to achieve his vision of a magazine that—unlike the popular Saturday Evening Post —would "not be (edited) for the old lady in Dubuque." But in fact, the magazine, with its deliberately cosmopolitan focus, found unexpectedly wide favor across the country. Over the next decades, stories and cartoons from...