Yet Ross also recorded Hemingway’s poignant reflections on the nature of writing and mortality. He occasionally blurted, “How do you like it now, gentlemen?” which became the title of the story. Hemingway often had a drink in his hand and sometimes spoke in a peculiar, clipped form of pidgin English, even when describing his own fiction: “Book start, then increase in pace till it becomes impossible to stand. Her most acclaimed early subject was Hemingway, whom she accompanied in 1950 on his short visit to New York. One of her New Yorker colleagues, humorist James Thurber, called her “the girl with the built-in tape recorder” for her ability to capture dialogue with pen and paper.Īmong the hundreds of articles she wrote for the magazine were memorable portraits of diamond merchant Harry Winston, fashion designer Coco Chanel, playwright Edward Albee and film stars ranging from Charlie Chaplin to Robin Williams. Short, blunt and tirelessly observant, Ross was equipped with a supply of 3-by-5-inch notebooks and a sharp ear for speech. Two years later, her book Picture, a behind-the-scenes exploration of filmmaking, became known as perhaps the first nonfiction novel and a model for later literary works by Truman Capote, Norman Mailer and other writers. Ross wrote about athletes, the Miss America pageant and street-wise high school students, but she gained particular renown with her straightforward 1950 profile of novelist Ernest Hemingway that many readers initially found cruelly unflattering. Her deepest attachment was to the magazine’s longtime editor, William Shawn - a relationship she detailed in a memoir that revealed her decades-long love affair with the soft-spoken editor, who was married to another woman the entire time. Ross began working at The New Yorker in 1945, when the weekly magazine was guided by its founding editor, Harold Ross (no relation), and teemed with dazzling literary talent, including Janet Flanner, A.J.

The cause was a stroke, said her longtime New Yorker editor, Susan Morrison. L illian Ross, whose innovative journalism appeared in The New Yorker magazine for eight consecutive decades, and whose profiles and articles were considered forebears of both the nonfiction novel and unsparing modern celebrity profile, died Wednesday at a Manhattan hospital.

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