Chapter One
Researching a biography is often compared to detective work, and certainly much
sleuthing must transpire before the first word ever slips from the writer's
fingertips. Even so, I find this analogy altogether too grim, not only for its
criminal overtones but for its suggestion of a kind of purposeful slogging on the
part of the pursuer. For most biographers there is more sheer joy in the exercise
than that; it is less a life-or-death pursuit than an open-ended game of hide-and-
seek. Some writers find their quarry, others never do. The serendipity is part of
the fun.
As for me, I found Harold Wallace Ross in Room 328 of the New York Public
Library. True, he had been dead for more than forty years. But Ross, founding
editor and guiding spirit of The New Yorker magazine, is loudly, reprovingly alive
in the tens of thousands of letters packed away in a hundred or more archival
containers. Before I ever got into the magazine's archives, now kept at the
library, I had formed a strong impression of Ross, one gleaned from dozens of
interviews with those who knew him, from the memoirs of others, and from the
sundry correspondence of his that I had unearthed in other collections. But
nothing prepared me for the sheer pe ... read full excerpt from: Letters from the Editor ebook
