Harold Ross created and for twenty-seven years edited one of the most important magazines of the twentieth century, the New Yorker. Ross was not a New Yorker by birth or upbringing, and his quirks and lack of sophistication often made him seem an odd character at the helm of the New Yorker. Yet his success is attributable to his talents for improvisation, a masterful reading of the marketplace, and, according to some of his contemporaries, a sure sense of taste. The magazine became his enduring achievement, an institution that attracted many of the best writers and employed some of the ablest editors in America.

When Harold Wallace Ross was born on 6 November 1892 in Aspen, Colorado, his father, George, an immigrant in 1881 from County Monaghan, Ireland, was working as a mining technician. The family moved seven years later to Salt Lake City, where George went into the demolition business...