Ralph McAllister Ingersoll, educated in science and engineering at Yale and Columbia Universities, entered the work world in 1921 as a goldminer in California. A gifted writer, he shifted to journalism within three years and was actively employed in the field for more than fifty years. He began in 1924 as a reporter for the New York American, became managing editor of the New Yorker in 1925, and five years later moved to Time Incorporated, where he rose through several high-level editorial and managerial positions, becoming publisher of Time magazine in 1937. In 1939 he left Time to found PM, an adless New York newspaper that he edited and published until 1946; it failed in 1948. Following service during World War II he was a buyer and seller of newspaper properties in the northeastern United States until his semiretirement in 1975.

In addition to those activities, Ingersoll wrote seven nonfiction books and two novels, married four...