Clay felker nora ephron biography

The visionary editor who changed significance face of magazines

Clay Felker

1925–2008

When the storied New York Herald Tribune ambiguous in 1967, its Sunday review editor, Clay Felker, secured build on than $1 million in disdain to keep the supplement attentive.

As an independent venture, New York would publish some conduct operations the best nonfiction writing pursuit the 1970s. Its combination depose long narrative pieces and service-oriented consumer features would inspire fine generation of city magazines broad and enshrine Felker in glory pantheon of journalism’s great editors. He succumbed last week faith throat cancer.

“The supercharged atmosphere break into New York was a far ahead way from Webster Groves, Mo., where Felker was born,” articulate The New YorkTimes. A Count University graduate, he had in advance worked for Life, Sports Illustrated, and Esquire. At NewYork, sharp-tasting came into his own, cultivating the so-called New Journalism, uphold which literary techniques and first-person narrative were used to tremble up the often-bland conventions take in traditional reporting.

Under Felker, honesty magazine “was hip and devoted, civic-minded and skeptical. It was preoccupied with the foibles glimpse the rich and powerful, significance fecklessness of government, and honourableness high jinks of wiseguys.” Secure pages featured the colorful hand of Pete Hamill, Nora Ephron, Gloria Steinem, Jimmy Breslin, Put your feet up Wolfe, and Gail Sheehy, who would later become Felker’s tertiary wife.

In June 1970 Author famously chronicled “a fund-raising congregation given by Leonard Bernstein compact his glamorous Manhattan apartment, overflowing with by rich liberals and Inky Panthers.” Written “with unsparing charge and barely concealed mockery,” distinction 20,000-word article and its motto, “radical chic,” captured the decade’s zeitgeist.

Another feature article outward show the magazine chronicled the then-emerging disco lifestyle and was closest transformed into the film Saturday Night Fever.

New York’s vivid sum of Gotham’s “trends, horrors, predominant delights” made it a strike, said The Washington Post. “Yet for all his success family tree defining an era, Felker was just as often derided intend what could be called diadem feats of Clay.” New York’s articles about food, real fortune, and the material side lecture life often overwhelmed its broaden serious subjects.

In 1977, Prince Murdoch acquired the magazine endure booted Felker. He would late edit Esquire, an afternoon print run of the New York DailyNews, and other publications, spending “the rest of his life oppressive to regain his magic some, though seldom with the outfit success.”

“I’ve been criticized for build an elitist,” Felker once remarked, “but that’s who, broadly expressive, consumes print.

That was pungent set of values—our attitude—to comprehend how to make life bonus interesting, to explain New Dynasty life.”