Books, Arts & Manners: A Reputation in Tatters

Ralph Ingersoll: A Biography, by Roy Hoopes (Atheneum, 441 pp., $19.95)

I don’t know how many daily newspapers have gone under in New York City since Peter Zenger’s time, but it must be dozens and dozens. I myself remember, before the later mergers and other permutations, when there were Pulitzer’s New York World, Scripps-Howard’s Telegram, the conservative Sun, the Hearst Journal-American, the Daily Mirror, Bernarr Macfadden’s Daily Graphic (as a tribute to its explicit composographs, it was also known as the “Pornographic”), the Reids’ Herald Tribune. And then there was the newspaper PM, founded in 1940 by Ralph McAllister Ingersoll. It, too, went under, in 1947, a victim of the founder’s egomania, intellectual dishonesty, and indubitable pro-Communism.

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Ralph Ingersoll: A Biography, by Roy Hoopes (Atheneum, 441 pp., $19.95)

I don’t know how many daily newspapers have gone under in New York City since Peter Zenger’s time, but it must be dozens and dozens. I myself remember, before the later mergers and other permutations, when there were Pulitzer’s New York World, Scripps-Howard’s Telegram, the conservative Sun, the Hearst Journal-American, the Daily Mirror, Bernarr Macfadden’s Daily Graphic (as a tribute to its explicit composographs, it was also known as the “Pornographic”), the Reids’ Herald Tribune. And then there was the newspaper PM, founded in 1940 by Ralph McAllister Ingersoll. It, too, went under, in 1947, a victim of the founder’s egomania, intellectual dishonesty, and indubitable pro-Communism.