Harold Ross

Early life[edit]

Born in a prospector's cabin^[1] in Aspen, Colorado, Ross was the son of Scots-Irish^[2] immigrant miner George Ross and schoolteacher Ida (née Martin) Ross.^[3] When he was eight, the family left Aspen because of the collapse in the price of silver, moving to Redcliff and Silverton, Colorado, then to Salt Lake City, Utah. In Utah, he worked on the high school paper (The West High Red & Black) and was a stringer for The Salt Lake Tribune, the city's leading daily newspaper. He dropped out of school at 13 and ran away to his uncle in Denver, where he worked for The Denver Post. Though he returned to his family, he did not return to school, instead getting a job at the Salt Lake Telegram, a smaller afternoon daily newspaper.


By the time he was 25 he had worked for at least seven different papers, including the Marysville, California Appeal; the Sacramento Union; the Panama Star and Herald; the New Orleans Item; the Atlanta Journal; the Hudson Observer in Hoboken; the Brooklyn Eagle; and the San Francisco Call.


In Atlanta, Georgia, he covered the murder trial of Leo Frank, one of the "trials of the century". During World War I, he enlisted in the United States Army's 18th Engineer Regiment in 1917. In France, he edited the regimental journal and went to Paris to work for the Stars and Stripes, serving from February 1918 to April 1919. He claimed to have walked 150 miles to reach Paris to write for Stars and Stripes,^[3][1] where he met Alexander Woollcott, Cyrus Baldridge, Franklin Pierce Adams, and Jane Grant, who would become his first wife and helped back The New Yorker.


After the war, he returned to New York City and assumed the editorship of a magazine for veterans, The Home Sector. It folded in 1920 and was absorbed by the American Legion Weekly. He spent a few months at Judge, a humor magazine.