“Lillian Ross wrote a profile of me which I read, in proof, with some horror,” Hemingway later recalled. Ross was friendly with Hemingway - she liked most of her subjects but her article was criticized, and welcomed, as humanizing a legend. She presented the author as a volatile bulk of bluster and insecurity, speaking in telegraphic shorthand (“You want to go with me to buy coat?”) and even punching himself in the stomach to prove his muscle. In the late 1940s, Hemingway came to New York for shopping and socializing and Ross joined him as he drank champagne with Marlene Dietrich, bought a winter coat and visited the Metropolitan Museum of Art, flask in hand. Short and curly-haired, unimposing and patient, Ross tried her best to let the stories speak for themselves, but at times the writer interrupted. “She is the mistress of selective listening and viewing, of capturing the one moment that entirely illumines the scene, of fastening on the one quote that Tells All,” novelist Irving Wallace wrote in a 1966 The group, assembled by New York University, ranked it No. She regarded herself as a short story writer who worked with facts, or even as a director, trying to “build scenes into little story-films.” In 1999, her 1964 collection of articles, “Reporting,” was selected by a panel of experts as one of the 100 best examples of American journalism in the 20th century. Ross’ approach, later made famous by the “New Journalists” of the 1960s, used dialogue, scene structure and other techniques associated with fiction writers.

“It’s sort of like having sex,” she once wrote.

The New Yorker and as a truly innovative artist, someone who helped change and shape non-fiction writing in English,” Remnick wrote.

“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 New Yorker editor David Remnick called Ross a groundbreaking writer. New Yorker articles editor Susan Morrison said on Wednesday. Ross died early Wednesday at Lenox Hill Hospital after suffering a stroke, New Yorker reporter whose close narrative style defined a memorable and influential 70-year career, including a revealing portrait of Ernest Hemingway, a classic Hollywood expose and a confession to an adulterous affair, has died at age 99.

Reporting always lillian ross