Photograph by William Shawn

Lillian Ross came of age at a time when it was impolite to ask a lady how old she was, and—quaintly, miraculously—that practice, as it pertained to her, was observed well into the era of full disclosure. For those of us who joined the magazine in the later years of her tenure—which is to say, almost all of us—she was a colleague of indeterminate seniority.

It was not until Lillian witnessed the way in which Nelson Mandela was fêted upon his ninety-fifth birthday, in 2013, that she realized that to have reached her advanced age, with her accomplishments, was, in a way, an accomplishment of its own. Thereafter, her age became an open point of pride: she turned ninety-nine in June.

Lillian joined The New Yorker in 1945, and she continued to appear in its pages for the next seventy-odd years, which means that she was not just a contributor but a creator—one of those whose style and tone became a standard to which later writers aspired. That tone—acutely observant, intimate, and very frequently amused—emerged in some of her earliest and best-known pieces, including her Profile of Ernest Hemingway and the five-part series on the making of John Huston’s “The Red Badge of Courage.” (The Xeroxes of her articles made for distribution in the nation’s journalism classes, if piled on top of one another, would reach to the moon.) She was a master of the Talk of the Town form, with its comic distillation of social mores. She was game for anything, but also knew when to turn an assignment down. When she was pitched a Talk piece on the Hope Diamond, in 2010, she said she didn’t see a story in it. “It may be I’m the wrong one to look,” she wrote to her editor. “The memory of the original Harry Winston I wrote about in 1954 is too strong, the way he touched his diamonds and talked about them as his children.”

Ross, who spent decades in a relationship with William Shawn, the second editor of this magazine, who was married, adopted a son, Erik, who was born in 1965. Ebullient in motherhood, she sent a baby photograph to J. D. Salinger, a friend of long standing. “He’s roaring with laughter,” Salinger wrote back. “Oh, if he can only hold on to it.”

It was appropriate that Lillian defied being defined by her years: her rapport with younger people, especially very young people, was immediate and absolute. She adored babies, insisting on visiting the home of one young colleague the day after his firstborn son came home from the hospital. “I like ’em fresh!” she said.

In 1960, she joined a group of twelfth graders from Bean Blossom Township High School, in Stinesville, Indiana, population three hundred and fifty-five, when they arrived in New York City for a class trip, and deftly chronicled their wary distaste for the ways of the natives, observing, “The three girls who didn’t want to go to Coney Island explained that they firmly believed that the class should ‘have fun’ on its last night in the city, and not before.”

In her fifth decade as a staff writer, in the mid-nineties, she sat down with a bunch of private-school tenth graders on the Upper East Side. Ross always had an ear for the weird rhythms of spoken English, and she captured their profanity-laced, world-weary, sublimely innocent conversation—in a notebook; she didn’t believe in using recorders—for one of her best Talk of the Town stories. “The Shit-Kickers of Madison Avenue” was one of the earliest efforts among reporters to capture uptalk on the page: “You three come to my house you know at five? You bring all your clothes? I take everything out of my closet and spread everything out on the floor? We try on all the stuff?”

She took young people seriously, an art not always cultivated among grownups. (She wrote a Talk story about Lin-Manuel Miranda a decade ago, when he was a mere stripling of twenty-seven.) In so doing, she provided an example of how to be taken seriously by younger people—an objective that, for women especially, becomes more challenging as the years mount. Lillian was a generous champion of younger writers at the magazine, especially younger writers who sought, like her, to chronicle New York’s human comedy. In them—in us—she surely recognized her mischievous, enduring, shit-kicking self. ♦