The following is the introduction to “The 40s: The Story of a Decade,” an anthology of New Yorker articles, stories, and poems published this week.

Gap-toothed and spiky-haired, Harold Ross arrived in New York after the Great War and soon became one of the city’s most fantastical characters. He was twenty-seven, an eccentric searcher shaped by a dropout youth in the American West and a knockabout start in the news business; before he enlisted, he’d worked for two dozen papers, some of them for no more than a few weeks. Ross had a lucky war. He battled the Germans by editing Stars & Stripes in Paris. When he landed in Manhattan, he took up residence in Hell’s Kitchen and went to work for a veterans’ publication called The Home Sector. He also worked for a few months, in 1924, for Judge, a Republican-funded humor magazine. In the meantime, he acquired a circle of young Jazz Age friends (he played softball with Harpo Marx and Billy Rose, shot ducks with Bernard Baruch) and conceived an idea for a fizzy Manhattan-centric magazine of his own—a “fifteen-cent comic paper,” he called it. For financial backing, he hit up a baking and yeast scion named Raoul Fleischmann. Ross never really liked Fleischmann (“The major owner of The New Yorker is a fool,” he once wrote; “the venture therefore is built on quicksand”), but Fleischmann gave him the wherewithal to lure artists and writers from his accumulating circle of friends, hungry freelancers, disgruntled newspapermen, and Broadway lights. Harold Ross was in business.

From the moment he published the first issue of the magazine, in February 1925, he became one of midtown’s most talked-about characters. He was the profane rube who had a mystical obsession with grammatical punctilio and syntactical clarity. He was the untutored knucklehead (“Is Moby Dick the man or the whale?” he famously asked) who lived on unfiltered cigarettes, poker chips, and Scotch and yet somehow managed to hire James Thurber and E. B. White, Janet Flanner and Lillian Ross, Edmund Wilson and Vladimir Nabokov, A. J. Liebling and Joseph Mitchell. He could not afford to pay Hemingway’s short-story rates, and so—with the guidance of a fiction department led by a cultivated Bryn Mawr graduate named Katharine Angell (later Katharine White)—he went about discovering John O’Hara, John Cheever, J. D. Salinger, and Shirley Jackson. His editorial queries (“Were the Nabokovs a one-nutcracker family?”) got to the heart of things.

Ross was in on the joke of his bumpkin persona, and later became its captive, a lonely, twice-divorced workaholic. But he marshaled that persona to lead, to cajole, to set a tone at the magazine that was high-minded in its studied lack of high-mindedness. Ross had the sort of editorial personality that caused his deputies and writers to weep, sometimes in despair, sometimes in gratitude. One day, he would send a note saying “WRITE SOMETHING GOD DAMN IT.” And then, on the occasion of good work, he would send a message reading, “I am encouraged to go on.” It was all in the service of the weekly cause. He was nothing if not clear. To break up his first marriage, he sent his wife a kind of editorial memo that left no doubt of her faults and his own. Thurber took a crack at portraying the man in “The Years with Ross,” and Wolcott Gibbs wrote a play, “Season in the Sun,” with a directive that the actor playing the Ross character ought to be able to play Caliban or Mr. Hyde “almost without the assistance of makeup.”

The richest and funniest portrayal of Ross and the day-to-day affairs of The New Yorker, however, resides in his letters, which were edited, expertly, by his biographer, Thomas Kunkel. Those letters reveal the inner life of Ross—the irascibility, the devotion, the single-mindedness—and the evolution of his idea for the New York-based weekly. “Let the other magazines be important,” he said throughout the twenties and thirties. Ross was determined to keep things light, to publish fiction, humor, reviews, artwork, and reporting that avoided heaviness, pretension. His models included Punch, the British publication known for its cartoons, and Simplicissimus, a satirical German weekly. He disdained the quarterlies, academia, and analysis—the genre known to him as “thumb-suckers.” He prized shoe-leather reporting, vivid observation, absolute clarity, and conversational tone. He preferred a limited circulation (with expensive ads) to a mass audience. He wanted a magazine that was more stylish than Life, more upscale than Collier’s, more timely than Vanity Fair.

Ross was not an especially political man. His racial views were retrograde, even for the times. He tended toward isolationism. When forced, he said, “I’m a liberal, though, by instinct. Human, you might say, and a meliorist by belief.” But politics and polemics were not in his early plans for the magazine; he intended to enjoy the Jazz Age, not sing the blues of impending crash. Editorially and commercially, he had conceived The New Yorker for the city’s “sophisticates,” a silvery, elusive sensibility that was defined, particularly in those prewar years, by an aloofness to the troubles of the world. The magazine’s dominant visual artist at the time was Peter Arno, an East Coast aristocrat, who, in his covers, portrayed the Depression, when he portrayed it at all, as a mild joke.

Ross’s letters, particularly in the magazine’s first ten years, show little concern about money and the Depression, except where it concerns the complicated financial arrangements he had with his ex-wife or a drop in ad pages. Two financial subjects do seem to thrill him: the successful investment he made in Chasen’s, a smart-set restaurant in Los Angeles built by the vaudevillian Dave Chasen, and the hiring of editorial talent—particularly Katharine Angell, who raised immeasurably the ambitions of the fiction department, and William Shawn, who came to work on “fact” pieces and eventually led the magazine for three and a half decades. On the whole, standards of rectitude and taste, sometimes in the form of puritanical reserve, were more on his mind. In one prolonged letter, he has the energy to debate with E. B. White about the use of the phrase “toilet paper,” for instance, which Ross finds “sickening.” (“It might easily cause vomiting,” he insists. “The fact that we allow toilet paper to be advertised, under the name ‘Satin Tissue,’ has nothing to do with this matter.”) You can read your way through countless letters and think that the Depression did not exist; it hardly cast a shadow on The New Yorker. When James Agee and Walker Evans went off to investigate poverty in rural Alabama, it was for Fortune.

There were those who noticed The New Yorker’s determined detachment. “In the class war The New Yorker is ostentatiously neutral,” Dwight Macdonald wrote, in a 1937 essay for Partisan Review called “Laugh and Lie Down.” “It makes fun of subway guards and of men-about-town, of dowagers and laundresses, of shop girls and debutantes.… Its neutrality is itself a form of upper class display, since only the economically secure can afford such Jovian aloofness from the common struggle.” On September 6, 1940—one year after the Nazi invasion of Poland; six weeks after the magazine finished running St. Clair McKelway’s unflattering Profile of Walter Winchell—Ross posted a confessional on the bulletin board that seemed to echo Macdonald’s point.