Like so many figures who come to be enshrined as “quintessentially New York,” Harold Ross, the founder and first editor of this magazine, was an outsider who arrived in the big city nursing an ambition.

Ross subsisted on nicotine, coffee, and nerves. The hours he kept were horrible, and his three marriages failed. But he fulfilled his dream. The New Yorker found its footing during the Depression. And although the magazine began to venture far beyond midtown with the start of the Second World War, the city remained an essential terra firma, a spirit and a home.

This week, while we digest one holiday and prepare for more, we’ve decided to open the archive and republish a sampling of New York stories, New York essays, New York poems, and New York drawings. There’s even a classic New York cover, by the Mexican artist Matías Santoyo. All the pieces you’ll find in this issue, fiction and nonfiction, are set in the city, and all are deeply personal.