William Whitworth, who wrote insightful portraits in The New Yorker that gave voice to his idiomatic subjects and, as co-editor, refined the prose of some of the country’s celebrated writers before bringing that magazine’s meticulous standards to The Atlantic, where He was editor-in-chief for 20 years, died Friday in Conway, Arkansas, near Little Rock. He was 87.
His daughter, Katherine Whitworth Stewart, announced the death. She said he was being treated in a hospital after several falls and surgeries.
As a young college graduate, Mr. Whitworth gave up a promising career as a jazz trumpeter to pursue a different kind of improvisation as a journalist.
He covered breaking news for the Arkansas Gazette and later the New York Herald Tribune, where his colleagues eventually included some of the most exciting voices in American journalism, including Dick Schaap, Jimmy Breslin and Tom Wolfe.
In 1966, William Shawn, the decent but dictatorial editor of the New Yorker, recruited Mr. Whitworth to the revered weekly. He took the job even though he had already accepted one at The New York Times.
At the New Yorker, he brought humor to the thoughtful “Talk of the Town” vignettes. He also introduced the famous and the not-so-famous, including jazz greats Dizzy Gillespie and Charles Mingus (accompanied by photos from his former Herald Tribune colleague Jill Krementz) and foreign policy adviser Eugene V. Rostow. He expanded his profile of Mr. Rostow in a 1970 book called “Naive Questions about War and Peace.”
Mr. Whitworth gave each person he portrayed ample opportunity to be quoted, and equally provided each with ample petards to rise upon.
In 1966 he wrote with characteristic detachment about Bishop Homer A. Tomlinson, an amiable man from Queens who had run a small advertising agency and now, as head of a Church of God flock, had declared himself king of the world. Bishop Tomlinson called for millions of believers – including all Pentecostals. “He thinks they are his,” Mr. Whitworth wrote, “whether they know it or not.”
Of Joe Franklin, the long-running television and radio host, Mr. Whitworth wrote in 1971 that his office “if it were a person, it would be a bum” – but that “Joe is more cheerful and positive on the air than Norman.” Vincent Peale and Lawrence Welk together.”
At the New Yorker from 1973 to 1980 and then at the venerable Atlantic Monthly, where he was editor until his retirement in 1999, and later when he worked on books, Mr. Whitworth was most valued as a nonfiction editor.
Aside from the writers he mentored, encouraged and protected, his role remained largely unknown outside the publishing industry. To colleagues who often wondered why he had given up reporting, he said he couldn’t lick it, so he agreed: “He was just tired of editors, especially newspaper editors, mangling his prose, which nevertheless would be published under his own byline.
“You want to fail on your own terms, not in the voice of someone else who sounds like yourself,” he said at the 2011 Oxford American Summit for Ambitious Writers.
Mr. Whitworth edited relentless perfectionists like film critic Pauline Kael (who almost clashed with Mr. Shawn) and Robert A. Caro (who was ultimately pleased with the final excerpts of “The Power Broker,” his biography of Robert Moses). , published in The New Yorker – after Mr. Whitworth interceded with Mr. Shawn – that he had asked Mr. Whitworth to edit it when The Atlantic published a summary of the first volume of his Lyndon B. Johnson biography.
How could he win over recalcitrant writers?
“As long as you kept them in the game and didn’t do anything behind their backs, slowly explaining to them why it would help them, which it did, it protected them, not us, and they came around,” he told the Oxford American Summit.
For Mr. Whitworth, said essayist Anne Fadiman, who worked with him at The American Scholar after he left The Atlantic, “editing was a conversation and also a form of teaching.”
Sometimes Mr. Whitworth offered sage advice that went beyond editing.
After writing an article about the Grand Ole Opry for The New Yorker, Garrison Keillor “urged me to do a Saturday night variety show myself along the lines of the Opry, which led to ‘A Prairie Home Companion,’ which gave me a… provided employment over the next few years,” Mr. Keillor said via email. “Unusual. Like a sportswriter who becomes a major league pitcher, or an obituary writer who opens a morgue. I’ve been grateful ever since.”
New Yorker writer Hendrik Hertzberg wrote on his blog in 2011 that despite his capacity for self-deprecation, Mr. Whitworth and Mr. Shawn had much in common, “including a gentle manner, a keen understanding of literary neuroses and a deep love” of jazz .”
In 1980, Mr. Whitworth was considered the most likely candidate to succeed Mr. Shawn, who was stubbornly unwilling to take over. Instead of engaging in what he described to a friend as “patricide” to oust Mr. Shawn, he took over the editorship of The Atlantic from its new owner, Mortimer Zuckerman. He didn’t regret anything.
“I got over The New Yorker a long time ago,” he wrote in a letter to Corby Kummer, a former senior editor and food columnist at The Atlantic — who, he said, “lived up to all my expectations and hopes.”
“I couldn’t have been so happy and proud in any other job,” he added.
Under Mr. Whitworth’s leadership, The Atlantic won nine National Magazine Awards, including the 1993 Award for General Excellence.
He also worked for months editing the text for In the Field: A Sociologist’s Journey (2011) by Renée C. Fox in a correspondence that lasted for months without them ever meeting in person.
Mr. Whitworth’s proposals, Professor Fox recalled in Commentary in 2011, “were usually written in his characteristic succinct style, always polite, gentlemanly and modest in tone, sometimes self-deprecating and often dry and witty.”
“The editor,” she continued, “taught the author about intellectual, grammatical, aesthetic, historical, and moral components of writing and editing that had not previously occurred to her or were unknown to her.”
William Alvin Whitworth was born on February 13, 1937 in Hot Springs, Arkansas. His mother, Lois (McNabb) Whitworth, was a china and silver buyer at Cave’s Jewelers (where she often assisted Bill Clinton in purchasing gifts for Hillary). His father, William C. Whitworth, was an advertising executive.
He attended Central High School while also working part-time as a copier in the advertising department of The Arkansas Democrat. After graduating, he majored in English and minored in philosophy at the University of Oklahoma, but dropped out before his senior year to play trumpet in a six-piece jazz band.
He married Carolyn Hubbard; She died in 2005. In addition to her daughter, he is survived by a half-brother, F. Brooks Whitworth. A son, Matthew, died in 2022. Mr. Whitworth had lived in Conway since his retirement from The Atlantic.
The literary agent Lynn Nesbit remembered Mr. Whitworth as a “stunningly brilliant and demanding editor” whose “own ego never got in the way of his editorial brilliance.” Charles McGrath, another former New Yorker editor who later edited The New York Times Book Review, said that unlike Mr. Shawn, Mr. Whitworth was “more loved than feared.”
But he was no pushover. While he often quoted Mr. Shawn as saying that “falling short of perfection is simply an endless process,” he more or less repeated what he called the “neurotic system” of The New Yorker’s careful editing at The Atlantic.
“He taught me that the worst approach for an editor is to put your paws on a piece because you know how to organize and write it better,” said Mr. Kummer, now executive director of Food & Society at Aspen Institute is .
“The author’s name was on the piece, not yours,” he continued, “and no matter how bitter the arguments over wording, punctuation, paragraph order, or word choice, the author had to be happy with a piece or it shouldn’t to be published.” .”
When he assigned Mr. Kummer to edit an article by the distinguished diplomat and historian George F. Kennan, Mr. Whitworth warned Mr. Kummer in no uncertain terms: “However much work you think he needs, remember: He is a giant. ”
But when Mr. Kennan later complained that Mr. Kummer had “caused me as much trouble as The New Yorker,” Mr. Whitworth replied, “That’s exactly what I pay him to do.”
Source link
2024-03-11 02:45:06
www.nytimes.com
