SOURCE: An excerpt from Here at the "New Yorker, "by Brendan Gill, Random House, 1975, pp. 388-95.

Shown joined the staff of the New Yorker in 1933 as a reporter for the magazine's "Talk of the Town" section and succeeded Harold Ross as editor of the magazine in 1952. In the following excerpt, he discusses Ross's editorship of the magazine.

Harold Ross presented himself to the world as a raucous, clumsy, primitive, somewhat comic figure. He said extremely funny things spontaneously and intentionally, and in his conversation and in his physical bearing he was funny unintentionally, or almost unintentionally, as well. He lent himself to anecdote. Because of this, and because his personal qualities were large in scale and included a formidable charm and magnetism, the serious and inspired work that he did as an editor tended at times to be lost sight of. Occasionally, when contemporaries of Ross talked about...