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The Fact Man. His fiercest prejudice was against writing that was not crystal clear. In its Profiles, Reporter at Large, Talk of the Town, etc., Ross insisted on knowing everything about the subject and the people, right down to their blood pressure. On the margins of manuscripts he scrawled scores of choleric questions and comments: "Who he," "What's that," "Don't think," "File and Forget." He never rewrote a piece himself, but his marginal scrawls often ran almost as long as the article. Another prejudice—against the traditional two-line* "he & she" cartoon—led to the one-line caption, sharpened by a dozen rewrites. Ross was as captious about cartoons as about stories. Looking at a cartoon, he would growl: "Who's talking?" A character had to have his mouth wide open so the reader would know instantly who was talking. Though his profanity was as natural and unconscious as his breathing, he was puritanical about the printed word. He even barred such words as "armpit" and "pratfall."
On fiction, Ross was never as sure of his touch—or The New Yorker's—as he was on fact. He ceaselessly searched for new authors, helped them develop new ways of telling stories, liked them plotless. But he was not always sure what the often neurotic, atmospheric stories were about. Once he grumbled: "I'm never going to buy another story I don't understand."
Clearing the Books. Ross drove himself hard. He developed ulcers; once he had a nervous breakdown. Later, he casually referred to this as "the time I went crazy." He drove his staff just as hard, but never nagged or chivied his writers or artists. He was alternately quiet and garrulous, biting and sentimental. Sometimes he encouraged struggling writers and cartoonists by buying material he knew he could not use. To regular contributors, he gave sizable monthly advances, often erasing their debts at Christmas.
When Drama Critic Wolcott Gibbs wrote Season in the Sun, which kidded Ross unmercifully, he went to see the play and liked it, although puzzled by it. "Everybody says it's just like me," he complained, "but I don't do that, do I?"
When success came to The New Yorker —its present circulation is 350,000, including 75 subscribers in Dubuque—Ross grew periodically bored, and the magazine occasionally suffered from it. Last April, he began to turn some of his work over to his editors, and stopped coming regularly to the office. But this time it was not boredom but something else. Last week, at 59, Editor Ross died in a Boston hospital after an operation for cancer.
Will The New Yorker keep its tone and quality without him? The staff thought it would; their indoctrination has been thorough. For the time being, the magazine will be run by the board of editors who took over when Ross became ill. The board includes William Shawn, 44, managing editor for nonfiction; Gus Lobrano, 49, managing editor for fiction, Art Editor James Geraghty, Executive Editor Leo Hofeller, Mrs. E. B. White, a fiction editor, and Hawley Truax, vice president. Eventually, a chief editor, probably Shawn, will be named.