A. Whitney Ellsworth (1936 - 2011)

A. Whitney Ellsworth, one of the founders of The New York Review of Books, and its publisher for nearly 25 years, died on Saturday at his home in Salisbury, Conneticut of pancreatic cancer. He was 75.

According to a New York Times obituary by William Grimes, Ellsworth was “a frustrated young editor at The Atlantic Monthly in the early 1960s when he began dreaming of a new kind of literary publication, in the spirit of British publications like The New Statesman, in which top-quality authors would be invited to contribute essay-like reviews of serious books.”

As Grimes details,

His dream was aided in December 1962, when a printers’ strike against New York’s main newspapers offered an unforeseen opportunity to start exactly the sort of journal Mr. Ellsworth had in mind.

The book editors Jason and Barbara Epstein had begun talking about the need for a new book review with Elizabeth Hardwick, the writer and critic; her husband, the poet Robert Lowell; and Robert B. Silvers, an editor at Harper’s. Recognizing that a newspaper strike would deprive book publishers of their New York advertising outlets, the cabal pounced. With financial backing from Mr. Lowell and a few of his wealthy friends, notably Blair Clark and Brooke Astor, an experimental issue of The New York Review of Books appeared in February 1963. A few weeks later, Mr. Epstein invited Mr. Ellsworth to his apartment and offered him not an editorial position, which he had been lobbying for — those slots were all filled — but the job of publisher.

“Without much thought, and certainly not questioning the position offered, I accepted,” Mr. Ellsworth wrote in a private memoir, adding that he occasionally regretted not working as an editor, but that “the glory of the Review trumps the regret.”