He? It’s Harold Ross’s 121st birthday: notreligious.typepad/.a/6a00e552e3404e88330120a4e50713970b-pi I like all the stories about him – how Alexander Woollcott once said that he ‘looked like a dishonest Abe Lincoln’; how Franklin P Adams, after a holiday in the mountains, was asked what Ross looked like tobogganing, and replied,’ Well, you know what Ross looks like not tobogganing’; how he got Nabokov to change the second ‘the’ in the phrase ‘the click of the nutcracker being passed’ to ‘a’; and all the rest. news.bbc.co.uk/dna/place-lancashire/plain/A21723491 The writers he attracted to the New Yorker – Thurber, EB White, Joe Mitchell, Perelman, Dorothy Parker, Janet Flanner, Benchley, John O’Hara, not to mention Salinger and Nabokov and Shirley Jackson and Edmund Wilson and Dwight Macdonald and the rest – still comprise an almost unbelievable set of exalted and varied talents. One of my favourite sentences from Thurber’s The Years With Ross, a book I first read fifty years ago and re-read every few years: ‘He read the Oxford English Dictionary the way other men read fiction.’ A dozen words recreate Ross in his idiosyncrasy, his vulnerability, his conviction, his sort-of genius.
Posted on: Wed, 06 Nov 2013 17:44:57 +0000
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