…Harold Ross, 31, is working on the prospectus for his new project, a weekly magazine for New Yorkers.
For the past year or so, he and his wife, reporter Jane Grant, 32, have been badgering everyone they know with a dummy of their proposed first issue, trying to scare up some funding. Finally, Harold’s friend from The Stars & Stripes newspaper in France during the war, New York World writer Alexander Woollcott, 37, has finally come through with an introduction to Raoul Fleischmann, 38, heir to the yeast fortune.
Now he’s got to pitch the idea. Really pitch it. Ross knows what he wants to say. But to give the project credibility, he has been advised to make use of the writers he lunches with at the Algonquin Hotel almost every day.
He can’t include Robert Benchley, just turned 34, because he is on contract to Life magazine. He really shouldn’t list his other Stars & Stripes buddies, columnist FPA [Franklin Pierce Adams, about to turn 43] and sports writer Heywood Broun, 35, because their employer the World newspaper, would not be happy.
Who’s left? Are they really his ‘advisors’? Can he claim that? Ross decides to take a risk:
Announcing a New Weekly Magazine:
The New Yorker:
The New Yorker will be a reflection in word and pictures of metropolitan life.
It will be human. Its general tenor will be one of gaiety, wit and satire,
but it will be more than a jester.
It will not be what is commonly called radical or highbrow.
It will be what is commonly called sophisticated,
in that it will assume a reasonable degree of enlightenment
on the part of its readers.
It will hate bunk…
The New Yorker will appear early in February.
The price will be: $5 a yr.
15 cents a copy
Address: 25 West 45th Street, New York City
Advisory Editors,
Ralph Barton
George S. Kaufman [34]
Heywood Broun
Alice Duer Miller
Marc Connelly [34]
Dorothy Parker [31]
Edna Ferber
Laurence Stallings
Rea Irvin
Alexander Woollcott
HW Ross, Editor”
The first cover of The New Yorker
Again this year, we’ll be telling stories about these groups of ‘such friends,’ during and after their times together.
Manager as Muse explores Scribner’s editor Maxwell Perkins’ work with F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and Thomas Wolfe and is available on Amazon in both print and Kindle versions.
To walk with me and the ‘Such Friends’ through Bloomsbury, download the Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group audio walking tour from VoiceMap. Look for our upcoming walking tour about the Paris ‘such friends.’
SuchFriends Blog 