The metropolitan who lacks urbanity

Jill Lepore wrote an article in the April 19, 2010 edition of The New Yorker, Untimely: What was at Stake in the Spate Between Henry Luce and Harod Ross. Each publisher, Luce with Time magazine and Ross with The New Yorker sought to distinguish themselves from the other.

In 1923, Luce started Time, a magazine meant to "appeal to every man and woman in America." Two years later, Ross launched The New Yorker, which he described - in a prospectus, in the inaugural issue, and on posters pasted all over New York - as the magazine that is "not edited for the old lady in Dubuque."

The editors of Time wrote a faux article claiming some correspondence with an old lady in Dubuque. Having purportedly sent her an edition of The New Yorker, her supposed response as recorded in the article was:

The editors of the periodical you forwarded are, I understand, members of a literary clique," she wired. "They should learn that there is no provincialism so blatant as that of the metropolitan who lacks urbanity."