Ralph Ingersoll (PM publisher)

Ralph McAllister Ingersoll (December 8, 1900 in New Haven, Connecticut – March 8, 1985 in Miami Beach, Florida) was an American writer, editor, and publisher. He is best known as founder and publisher of the short-lived 1940s New York City left-wing daily newspaper that refused to accept advertising PM.

Ingersoll went to Hotchkiss School, graduated from Yale University's Sheffield Scientific School and became a mining engineer in California, Arizona and Mexico. In 1923 he went to New York with the intention of becoming a writer.

He worked as a reporter for the New York American from 1923 to 1925, and then joined the The New Yorker where he was managing editor from 1925 to 1930. He had been hired by the New Yorker founder and editor Harold Ross a few months after the magazine commenced publication; Ross inadvertently spilled an inkwell on Ingersoll's new light suit (various sources claim it was either white or pale gray) during the job interview, then, in embarrassment, offered him the job. As Ingersoll left his office, he heard Ross mumble to his secretary: "Jesus Christ, I hire anybody." According to his biographer, Roy Hoopes, Ingersoll "was one of the original guiding spirits of The New Yorker. He held it together during its first five years."

In 1930 Ingersoll went to Time Inc. as managing editor of Time-Life publications, and devised the formula of business magazine Fortune, eventually becoming general manager of the company. One of his most important assignments at Fortune was a detailed history of The New Yorker and its business. The scrutiny that Ingersoll gave his former New Yorker boss Harold Ross and his employees, which included mention of their foibles and salaries, initiated a feud between Time and Fortune publisher Henry Luce and culminated in a famed profile by Ross of Luce by Wolcott Gibbs that ran in The New Yorker in 1936, which lampooned both Luce and "Timestyle", the inverted writing style for which Time was (in)famous. Luce retaliated by having caricaturist Al Hirschfeld draw an image of Joseph Stalin over a picture of Ross.

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