Harold Wallace Ross (November 6, 1892 – December 6, 1951) was an American journalist who co-founded The New Yorker magazine in 1925 with his wife Jane Grant, and was its editor-in-chief until his death.

[3] When he was eight, the family left Aspen because of the collapse in the price of silver, moving to Redcliff and Silverton, Colorado, then to Salt Lake City, Utah.

By the time he was 25 he had worked for at least seven different papers, including the Marysville, California Appeal; the Sacramento Union; the Panama Star and Herald; the New Orleans Item; the Atlanta Journal; the Hudson Observer in Hoboken; the Brooklyn Eagle; and the San Francisco Call.

In France, he edited the regimental journal and went to Paris to work for the Stars and Stripes, serving from February 1918 to April 1919.

He claimed to have walked 150 miles from officer's training school at Langres, France to reach Paris to write for Stars and Stripes,[3][1] where he met Alexander Woollcott, Cyrus Baldridge, Franklin Pierce Adams, and Jane Grant, who would become his first wife and helped back The New Yorker.

[7] Ross forbade sex as a subject, checking all art and articles for off-color jokes or double entendre[8] and rejected advertisements thought unsuitable.

Ross disliked fatalistic pieces and sought to minimize "social-conscious stuff," calling such articles "grim.

An irritated Ross, who saw his magazine as an underdog competing against the larger powerhouses, relented into allowing a reprint of the story in the Reader's Digest.

James Thurber quotes the reminiscences of many colleagues of both men in his 1959 memoir, The Years with Ross, citing his former chief's pranks, temper, profanity, anti-intellectualism, drive, perfectionism, and an almost permanent social discomfort, and how these all shaped The New Yorker staff.

Ross died of heart failure in Boston, Massachusetts in December 1951, during an operation to remove a lung after it was discovered his bronchial carcinoma had metastasized.