The Years with Ross by James Thurber

First published: 1959

Type of work: Memoir

Time of work: 1925-1951

Locale: New York and Europe

Principal Personages:

• Harold Ross, the founding editor of The New Yorker
• James Thurber, a humorist who wrote for The New Yorker

Form and Content

During the decade before Harold Ross’s death in 1951, several magazines asked James Thurber to contribute essays about Ross and about Thurber’s adventures with him in the weekly production of The New Yorker. Thurber declined these requests, but in 1957, Charles Morton, of The Atlantic Monthly, queried Thurber repeatedly about the possibility of a series of articles on Ross. One of these queries reached Thurber in the Bahamas just as he was giving up the writing of a play on which he had been working for several months. He said yes to Morton and wrote and published in The Atlantic Monthly several articles about Ross in 1957 and 1958. Upon realizing, however, that “the restless force named Harold Wallace Ross could not be so easily confined and contained,” he elected to amplify the written record of his memories of Ross considerably. In 1959, he published The Years with Ross.

Thurber indicates in his foreword to the book that from the beginning he avoided the writing of a formal biography. Nevertheless, many facts of Ross’s life—as well as Thurber’s—make their way into the book. Its principal device is the anecdote, and Thurber is himself able to supply many of these in building up a very solid— though never solemn—sense of Ross’s character. Citations concerning Ross from the letters and works of other people are copious without ever causing the work to seem crowded or chaotic. There was chaos in the life of Ross, but it all runs very smoothly in the prose of Thurber.

Since the center of Ross’s life from 1925 onward was The New Yorker, The Years with Ross is, among other things, a self-confessed “short informal history” of Ross’s magazine. Thurber does not attempt to move chronologically through either the life of Ross or that of The New Yorker. He chooses instead a scheme of what he calls “flashbacks and flashforwards.” The resultant rhythm of the book is one that accords handsomely with the very nature of Ross’s life, the comings to and goings from the office, the constant looking backward and forward from a worried present, a present always filled with the need to get out the next issue and to plan future issues, and with anguish over the possible recriminations from past issues.

In the Atlantic Monthly Press edition, The Years with Ross consists of sixteen chapters and 310 pages. The chapters, ranging in length from ten to twenty-nine pages, are wittily titled, alluding to generally Ross’s favorite sayings (“Sex Is an Incident,” “A Dime a Dozen”) or to some aspect of life and work in the offices of The New Yorker (“Every Tuesday Afternoon,” “The Talk of the Town”). Thurber also includes some twenty-five drawings of his, a number of which serve as either occasion for or illustrations of stories about Ross.

Critical Context

Thurber is sometimes criticized for depicting characters that are two-dimensional and quite alike, a glittering but small gallery of “Thurber men” and “Thurber women.” In The Thurber Album (1952) and The Years with Ross, however, his characterizations both deepen and broaden. Crediting Thurber with a thoroughgoing portrait of Ross, Robert Morsberger nevertheless argues that the book consists “mainly of brilliant, fragmentary glimpses of the editor.” Richard Tobias maintains, though, that The Years with Ross is “an inevitable book, a final statement of all Thurber’s themes.” He argues that the portrait of Ross was anticipated in earlier pieces (Thurber himself maintained that King Clode in The White Deer, 1945, was loosely based on Ross, and he attempted a play about Ross in 1948). According to Tobias, there is nothing fragmentary about the portrait of Ross; it is a carefully constructed tableau, which represents an attempt on Thurber’s part to make of Ross a modern hero, “Walter Mitty in triumph.” Whether one sees a hero in Ross depends upon one’s own concept of heroism; what is probably indisputable about The Years with Ross, however, is its place in Thurber’s oeuvre as a compendium of things he did well.

Bibliography

Coates, Robert M. “New Yorker Days,” in Thurber: A Collection of Critical Essays, 1974. Edited by Charles S. Holmes.

Ford, Corey. The Time of Laughter, 1967.

Kramer, Dale. Ross and the “New Yorker,” 1952.

Morsberger, Robert E. James Thurber, 1964.

Nugent, Elliott. Events Leading Up to the Comedy, 1965.

Plimpton, George, and Max Steele. “James Thurber,” in Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews, 1959. Edited by George Plimpton.

Tobias, Richard C. The Art of James Thurber, 1969.