Portfolio at NYU

Lillian Ross, Reporting (1964)
If The New Yorker is the vanguard of what is known as literary journalism, then leading the pack must be Lillian Ross, whose inextricable ties to the magazine span six decades.

Reporting is a collection of six essays that originally appeared in The New Yorker. They include Picture, a brutally honest vignette of Hollywood, focusing on the movie The Red Badge of Courage, and which Newsweek praised as the best book on Hollywood ever written; and Portrait of Hemingway, which remained controversial until the 1960s. Hemingway supported the profile — he said it was "much better than most novels" — and as Ross said: "The overwhelming reaction when it was first published was one of great enthusiasm and appreciation. Some people did not like it and said so; hence the 'controversy'."

It was Portrait that best exemplified Ross' writing style as an "invisible" author. Ross is intensely private in both her life and her writing. She believes that the author must be rendered invisible. A brilliant observer, very able in her selection of the one detail that will evoke the scene, and very direct, Ross elevated journalism definitely to a craft, arguably an art. Robert Manning in Book Week wrote that Ross "is a contemporary journalistic equivalent of Goya the court painter. With an Ampex ear, a scalpel for her palette knife and a cool, clear head for structure and style, she stands back from the situations she has chosen to chronicle or the subjects (one is strangely tempted to call them victims) who have somehow been beguiled into sitting for her."

Her detailed, studied approached can be seen in The Yellow Bus, one of the essays that comprises Reporting that chronicles a trip to New York by a busload of Mid-Western schoolchildren, while softly implying issues such as identity that are never explicitly handled.

Extremely careful to guard details of her own life, Ross' link to The New Yorker was galvanized by a 40-year liaison to its legendary editor, William Shawn that concluded only with his death in 1992. Ross documented this relationship in her memoir Here But Not Here (1998).

Mitch Stephens ranked Reporting at Number 66 for his millennium "Top 100" of twentieth century journalism. Of journalism, Ross wrote: "To me, [it] is factual writing and the highest kind of it comes in the form of good writing, and often writing that, at its best, is witty."

As journalists, we can take away from it the humble lesson that we are not what is important in a story, and strong characterization, scene-setting and detailed writing need not be the preserve of literature alone.

Other Reviews:

Irving Wallace at the New York Times Book Review: "Lillian Ross is the mistress of selectively listening and viewing, of capturing the one moment that entirely illuminates the scene, of fastening on the one quote that tells all. She is a brilliant interpreter of what she hears and observes."