Her 1950 profile of Hemingway was largely built around four scenes Ross witnessed when the great American novelist stopped in Manhattan on his way to Europe. She constructed her stories with a filmmaker’s sensibility, “always trying to build scenes into little story-films,” she explained in her 2002 book “Reporting Back.” “A reporter doing a story can’t pretend to be invisible, let alone a fly,” she often said, insisting that a reporter “is always chemically involved in a story.” This characterization of her working methods, though meant as flattery, struck Ross as absurd. The author of a dozen other books, some of which are standard reading in college writing courses, Ross was often described as a master of “fly-on-the-wall” journalism: She stayed out of the way and let her subjects tell the story through their actions and utterances. Shawn” even by longtime associates) could have read what Ross had written “he’d probably die all over again, this time of embarrassment.” James Wolcott, among others who knew Shawn, wrote in Vanity Fair that if the intensely private and proper editor (called “Mr. Her tell-all account of their four-decade affair in the book “Here But Not Here, My Life with William Shawn and The New Yorker” (1998) brought Ross the harshest reviews of her career, in part because it seemed to violate one of her own cardinal rules: to refrain from writing about anyone who did not want to be written about. Within five years, she was not only one of its top reporters but Shawn’s mistress in a closely guarded relationship that lasted until his death in 1992. Ross was hired as a staff writer for the New Yorker in 1945 by legendary editor William Shawn. In this respect she was a model for the New Journalism of the 1960s and ‘70s practiced by writers such as Norman Mailer, Hunter Thompson and Tom Wolfe. Her stories were so full of conversation and other particulars that writer Edmund Wilson referred to her as “that girl Lillian Ross with the built-in tape recorder.” (For the record, she never used one, preferring a pad and pen.) She captured human interactions with an unerring eye, while minimizing her own role in the narrative. ![]() It took up whole pages of her Hemingway profile, and sometimes one long, carefully groomed quote was all there was to her shorter masterpieces in the magazine’s “Talk of the Town” section. Once delivered, they became objects of her shrewd observation, fine ear for language and cinematic writing, the main elements of a style that could, novelist Irving Wallace noted many years ago, “suddenly, almost sneakily, nail a personality naked to a page.”Ī hallmark of her pieces was dialogue, which Ross believed revealed character more powerfully than any other device. Ross was a small, sturdy, round-faced woman with a folksy manner who so disarmed her subjects, colleague Ved Mehta once said, that they “delivered themselves unsuspectingly into her hands.” “Lillian would knock my block off for saying so, she’d find it pretentious, but she really was a pioneer, both as a woman writing at the New Yorker and as a truly innovative artist, someone who helped change and shape nonfiction writing in English,” Remnick said in a statement. New Yorker Editor David Remnick confirmed her death, but did not immediately have other details Wednesday. Lillian Ross, a celebrated New Yorker magazine writer who created classics of literary journalism, including novel-length pieces on Ernest Hemingway and the making of a Hollywood movie, has died.
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