This morning, we learned that Lillian Ross died last night, at the age of ninety-nine. Ross was one of the legends of American journalism. She began writing for The New Yorker in 1945, during the Second World War, and her humanity, curiosity, and novelistic approach to reporting shaped not just this magazine but the practice of journalism more broadly. She was one of the inventors of what we now call literary journalism, and an early architect of the The New Yorker’s Talk of the Town section. Her 1950 Profile of Ernest Hemingway was written like a short story, and her five-part article about the director John Huston and the making of “The Red Badge of Courage,” published in 1952, set a new standard in magazine writing for inventiveness and literary verve. (It was eventually published as a book, “Picture.”) Writing about her own journalism, in 2002, she dismissed the concept of the journalist acting as “a fly on the wall.” Tape-recorded interviews, according to Ross, were “lifeless.” A reporter, she noted, is “always chemically involved in a story.”
In total, Ross wrote more than five hundred pieces for The New Yorker, many of them for Talk of the Town. (Her Talk stories were published in three books, “Talk Stories,” “Takes,” and “The Fun of It”; her other reporting filled eight more volumes.) The finest reporters, she once said, are “truth tellers,” and her work perfectly exemplified that standard. In her tenure at the magazine, she covered everyone from Ingrid Bergman to Clint Eastwood—as Richard Brody notes, she wrote about film with particular insight and passion—and everything from the Miss America Pageant to the House Un-American Activities Committee. Below, you’ll find a selection of her pieces. We’ll be rereading them this week with gratitude for her immense contribution to the magazine and to literary journalism.
“Bearable” (February 8, 2010): Remembering a friendship with J. D. Salinger.
“Local Boy” (March 19, 2007): Lin-Manuel Miranda, before “Hamilton.”
“Nothing Fancy” (March 24, 2003): Clint Eastwood, the film director.
“The Shit-Kickers of Madison Avenue” (February 20, 1995): The private-school kids of the Upper East Side.
“Workouts” (April 7, 1986): Backstage with Robin Williams.
“Anatomy of a Commercial Interruption” (February 19, 1966): The filmmaker Otto Preminger’s fight to end commercial breaks.
“No. 1512” (May 24, 1952): The making of “The Red Badge of Courage.”
“How Do You Like It Now, Gentlemen?” (May 13, 1950): A Profile of Ernest Hemingway.
“Symbol of All We Possess” (October 22, 1949): On the Miss America pageant.
“Come In, Lassie!” (February 21, 1948): On Hollywood and the House Un-American Activities Committee.
Browse all of Lillian Ross’s stories in The New Yorker’s archive.
