Lillian Ross

Lillian Ross (1918-2017) joined the staff of The New Yorker in 1945, during the Second World War, and worked with Harold Ross, the magazine’s founder and first editor. She began as a Talk of the Town reporter and, over the course of her career, she has written hundreds of pieces, contributing to nearly every section of the magazine.

In the early nineteen-fifties, Ross went to Hollywood to cover John Huston’s filming of “The Red Badge of Courage.” Published in five parts in 1952, her article “Picture,” was a breakthrough work, the first piece of factual reporting cast in the form of a novel. After appearing in The New Yorker, it was published in book form later that year.

Many of Ross’s Talk of the Town pieces were collected in two books, “Talk Stories,” (1966) and “Takes,” (1983). An early compilation of her work, “Reporting,” (1964), has been called a vivid and valuable example of the journalist’s art. Other books drawn from Ross’s articles in The New Yorker include “Portrait of Hemingway,” (1961), “The Player,” (written with her sister Helen Ross, 1962), “Adlai Stevenson,” (1966), and “Moments with Chaplin,” (1980). Her satirical short stories about doctors and psychoanalysts were published as the novel “Vertical and Horizontal,” (1963). Her most recent book, the memoir “Here But Not Here,” was published in 1998. Ross was the editor of “The Fun of It,” (2001), a collection of the magazine’s Talk of the Town stories from 1925-2000.

Reading List: Lillian Ross recommends Anthony Lane's "The Master," about Philip Seymour Hoffman.