“You try not to get in the way of the person you’re trying to show,” she wrote of her technique. “You are trying to follow along the person you’re interviewing, to respond to him instead of coming along with a lot of prepared questions, you just get him going. Just don’t bother him. And listen. It’s just a question of listening.”

Here, for example, is how she depicted Louis B. Mayer, the Hollywood mogul, who opposed Huston’s idea of turning “The Red Badge of Courage” into a film (though she violated one of her cardinal rules by inserting herself into the passage):

“He pounded a commanding fist on his desk and looked at me. ‘Let me tell you something!’ he said. ‘Prizes! Awards! Ribbons! We had two pictures here. An Andy Hardy picture, with little Mickey Rooney, and “Ninotchka,” with Greta Garbo. “Ninotchka” got the prizes. Blue ribbons! Purple ribbons! Nine bells and seven stars! Which picture made the money? “Andy Hardy” made the money. Why? Because it won praise from the heart. No ribbons!’ ”

Ms. Ross’s work was often cited as a precursor of the New Journalism of the 1960s, in which nonfictional material was presented in forms drawn from imaginative literature.

Her 1960 article “The Yellow Bus,” for example, had the feel of a New Yorker short story. Exquisitely detailed and warmly sympathetic, it told of a senior-class trip — of “eight hundred and forty miles in thirty-nine and a half hours” — to New York by 18 wide-eyed students from rural Bean Blossom Township High School in the village of Stinesville, Ind.

“No one in the senior class had ever talked to a Jew,” Ms. Ross wrote, “or to more than one Catholic, or — with the exception of Mary Jane Carter, daughter of the Nazarene minister in Stinesville — had ever heard of an Episcopalian.”

Writing in The New York Times Book Review in 1966, the novelist Irving Wallace called Ms. Ross “the mistress of selective listening and viewing, of capturing the one moment that entirely illumines the scene, of fastening on the one quote that Tells All.”