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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 was the founder and publisher of the short-lived 1940s New York City left-wing daily newspaper PM.

Before founding PM, Ingersoll had been managing editor of Time-Life publications, and had devised the formula of business magazine Fortune.

Prior to that he had been a reporter for the New York American from 1923 to 1925, and then managing editor of The New Yorker from 1925 to 1930.

He was hired by the New Yorker founder and editor Harold Ross a few months after the magazine started publication; Ross inadvertently spilled an inkwell on Ingersoll's 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 complain to his secretary: "Jesus Christ, I hire anybody."

His biographer, Roy Hoopes, told The New York Times that Ingersoll "was one of the original guiding spirits of The New Yorker. He held it together during its first five years."

One of his first jobs at Fortune was to see that a detailed description of how The New Yorker was run was published. This initiated a feud between Time and Fortune publisher Henry Luce and Harold Ross, editor-in-chief of The New Yorker. Highlights (or lowlights) of the feud were a profile of Luce that ran in The New Yorker in 1936 that lampooned both Luce and "Timestyle", the art decoish writing style Time was (in)famous for and Luce getting caricaturist Al Hirschfeld to draw an image of Joseph Stalin over a picture of Ross.

PM was founded with $1.5 million of capital, a fraction of the $10 million that Ingersoll initially sought. Unlike usual U.S. practice, PM (1940—1948) took no advertising; editorials did not appear every day, and when they did were signed by an individual, initially Ingersoll himself, instead of anonymously coming from the paper itself. Sometimes these editorials took over the front page. His first editorial took a forthright stand on World War II, already under way in Europe: "We are against people who push other people around," he wrote, demanding material U.S. support for the nations opposing Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy.

The first year of the paper was a general success, though the paper was already in some financial trouble: its circulation of 100,000—200,000 was insufficient. Marshall Field III had become the paper's funder; quite unusually, he was a "silent partner" in this continually money-losing undertaking.

The 41-year-old Ingersoll was drafted into the military; when he returned after the war, he found a paper that was less lively and well-written than under his leadership, and with the pro-communist and anti-communist liberals writing at cross purposes. The paper never quite recovered, an early victim of the Cold War (and of Field's increasing interest in the Chicago Sun rather than PM).

Ingersoll later wrote numerous books about his service in World War II.

This author page uses material from the Wikipedia article "Ralph Ingersoll", which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License 3.0