William Whitworth, the editor of The Atlantic from 1980 to 1999, had a smooth voice and an Arkansas accent that fifty years of residing in New York and New England by no means a lot eroded. It was as a lot part of him as his love of jazz, his understated sartorial consistency, and his deep dismay when encountering the misuse of lie and lay, a battle he knew he had misplaced however continued to combat. Invoice, who led this journal throughout a interval of artistic evolution, died final week in Conway, Arkansas, close to his hometown of Little Rock, on the age of 87. He’s survived by his daughter, Katherine W. Stewart, by a half brother, F. Brooks Whitworth, and by a half sister, Sharon Persichitte.
Invoice was a mentor to 2 generations of writers—writers of narrative reporting, primarily, but in addition novelists, biographers, intellectuals, essayists, and humorists. He expanded The Atlantic’s topical vary and its cultural presence. His editorial instincts have been penetrating, however couched in a way that was calm and grounded. James Fallows, a longtime contributor who got here to The Atlantic a number of years earlier than Invoice arrived, was among the many folks we requested for his or her recollections. He remembers their preliminary assembly in a high-ceilinged workplace at 8 Arlington Road, in Boston, throughout from the Public Backyard:
I noticed a slight man, bearded, with receding hair, sporting a bow tie. “Mr. Fallows,” he mentioned softly, “I’m Invoice Whitworth.” Thus started an hour of his patiently asking me about how The Atlantic labored, and the way a lot I used to be paid, and why I’d made this or that selection within the latest tales I’d carried out. Invoice solely directed our first dialog with seemingly easy questions: Did you concentrate on this? Why did you write that? Are you able to clarify what the specialists are saying? What in the event that they’re all fallacious? Who did you need to discuss with who received ignored? What do you continue to must know?
A reporter’s function in life boils all the way down to going round and asking, “What is that this?” and “How does it work?” A long time of working with Invoice made his colleagues perceive that an editor’s function within the closing stage of an article boils all the way down to asking, “What are you making an attempt to say right here?” and “Can we depart this half out?” Within the conception stage of an article, the questions boil all the way down to “What have you ever seen?” and “Why does it matter?”
I like realizing that the one e-book with Invoice’s byline (versus the handfuls or a whole lot he impressed, improved, or edited), revealed when he was 33, is named Naïve Questions About Battle and Peace. The e-book is the lengthy transcript of a dialog—urged alongside by Invoice’s faux-naïve questions—with one of many Vietnam Battle’s essential defenders, Eugene V. Rostow. Rostow retains giving Invoice excessive idea as a rationale for the battle. Invoice retains asking “What are you making an attempt to say right here?” and “Why does it matter?”
William Alvin Whitworth was born in Scorching Springs, Arkansas, in 1937. He grew up in Little Rock, attended Central Excessive Faculty, acquired a B.A. from the College of Oklahoma, after which returned to Little Rock as a reporter for the Arkansas Gazette. Among the many tales he coated was the combat over desegregation, centered on his previous highschool. On the Gazette, Invoice met two individuals who grew to become lifelong mates—Ernest Dumas and Charles Portis, later a novelist (Norwood, True Grit, The Canine of the South). In 1963, Invoice adopted Portis to Manhattan to take a job on the New York Herald Tribune, the place his newsroom colleagues included Tom Wolfe, Jimmy Breslin, Dick Schaap, and the photographer Jill Krementz. On his second day on the Trib, John F. Kennedy was assassinated. In the course of the years that adopted, Invoice coated John Lindsay’s New York Metropolis mayoral race, Robert F. Kennedy’s Senate race, the primary Harlem riots, the free-speech motion at Berkeley, the Vietnam anti-war protests—he received tear-gassed lots—and the Beatles’ first journey to the USA. He was within the Ed Sullivan Theater for his or her American-television debut.
Krementz confirmed a few of Invoice’s clips to her good friend Brendan Gill, a employees author and drama critic for The New Yorker, who in flip shared them with the journal’s editor, William Shawn. In the future Invoice received a name from Shawn out of the blue, asking him to return by for a dialog. As Invoice recalled in an oral historical past for the Pryor Heart, on the College of Arkansas, “We had a number of mysterious conferences—mysterious to me, as a result of it was by no means specified why we have been speaking.” Till lastly Shawn provided him a job. He began at The New Yorker in 1966.
For the following seven years, he wrote full-time for the journal, primarily options below the “Profiles” and “Reporter at Massive” rubrics. A lot of his articles from that point would dwell within the journal Corridor of Fame, if such a spot existed—amongst them his profiles of the Theocratic Celebration’s recurring presidential candidate, Bishop Homer A. Tomlinson, and of the television-talk-show host Joe Franklin.
Within the early Nineteen Seventies, Invoice started to spend much less time writing and extra time modifying. Amongst his writers have been the journalist and historian Frances FitzGerald, the movie critic Pauline Kael, and the biographer Robert Caro, whose first e-book, The Energy Dealer, about Robert Moses, Invoice excerpted for the journal. Within the late Nineteen Seventies, Shawn started handing off a few of his duties to Invoice, who for a number of years served as his de facto deputy and inheritor obvious.
In 1980, the real-estate developer Mortimer B. Zuckerman purchased The Atlantic, which had been flailing financially below its earlier possession. He provided the job of editor to Invoice, who accepted it solely after Zuckerman agreed that he would by no means meddle in editorial affairs—a promise that he stored. For his first difficulty as editor—April 1981—Invoice featured a Philip Roth quick story on the quilt. The Whitworth-Roth friendship would final for many years, till Roth’s dying, interrupted just for a number of years within the Nineties when, after a scorching, two-sentence dismissal of considered one of his novels by The Atlantic’s e-book reviewer Phoebe-Lou Adams, Roth boxed up all his again problems with the journal and mailed them to Invoice, with a word saying that he would by no means communicate to him once more. And he didn’t, for a variety of years. Then in the future a postcard from Roth arrived within the mail. “Invoice,” it learn, “Let’s kiss and make up.”
One early coup for Whitworth’s Atlantic was an in depth excerpt—unfold over a number of points—from the primary quantity of Caro’s epic biography of Lyndon B. Johnson. Writers reminiscent of Seymour Hersh, V. S. Naipaul, and Garry Wills quickly began appearing within the journal. The December 1981 cowl story—“The Training of David Stockman,” by William Greider, a information editor at The Washington Publish—revealed that Ronald Reagan’s personal price range director believed the brand new administration’s “provide aspect” financial program to be basically specious. The article, primarily based on prolonged conversations with Stockman, brought about a furor. Over time, Invoice would publish work by Elijah Anderson, Saul Bellow, A. S. Byatt, Gregg Easterbrook, Louise Erdrich, Ian Frazier, Jane Jacobs, Robert D. Kaplan, George F. Kennan, Randall Kennedy, Tracy Kidder, William Langewiesche, Bobbie Ann Mason, Conor Cruise O’Brien, Barbara Dafoe Whitehead, E. O. Wilson, Gore Vidal, and lots of extra. Crucially, the roster didn’t consist solely of contributors who have been already large names. The author Holly Brubach remembers her personal expertise when she first sought to jot down for The Atlantic:
I used to be in my twenties, and, for causes I discovered laborious to fathom, Invoice believed in me—this was lengthy earlier than I believed in myself. The handful of writers I’d encountered claimed that they’d all the time felt destined for a life devoted to the making of literature, that they’d begun holding a journal in childhood; they by no means appeared to doubt that their concepts have been worthy of the reader’s consideration. On that foundation, I instructed Invoice, I didn’t suppose I used to be a author. He requested me if I trusted his judgment. After all I did. “Then why don’t you simply proceed on religion for some time?” he replied.
One other contributor, Benjamin Schwarz, describes his first encounter:
“Mr. Schwarz? That is Invoice Whitworth, at The Atlantic.” So Invoice launched himself to me, a neophyte author fumbling at a profession shift, after we first spoke, in 1995. I’d despatched Invoice an unsolicited, provocative manuscript barely per week earlier than, and he was calling to inform me he’d prefer to run it as the quilt story. That was all Invoice: open towards an unknown author, assured in his judgment, impervious to popularity and accepted opinion.
He was desirous to publish factors of view he didn’t agree with, as long as they adhered to sure requirements of rigor, and to publish articles that he could not have cared for stylistically, noting that homogeneity of style quickly makes any publication really feel stale. Nicholas Lemann, an Atlantic contributor throughout many of the Whitworth years, described a top quality in writing that Invoice all the time regarded for:
Once I went to work for him, I had a robust impulse to develop into a Homosexual Talese–type “literary journalist,” and he cured me of that. He insisted {that a} piece, or a minimum of a significant piece, have a robust and authentic level to make, no matter its virtues have been as an article. And he was fully, uncannily resistant to regardless of the liberal/media typical take of the second was. You needed to say one thing that the remainder of the world was not additionally saying. That has actually stayed with me—I attempt to put the work that I do to Invoice’s check on daily basis.
With the artwork director Judy Garlan, Invoice additionally made The Atlantic a showcase for artwork and graphic design, one thing that it had by no means been. Work by Edward Sorel, Seymour Chwast, Man Billout, and István Bányai, amongst others, appeared usually in its pages. The Atlantic started to win awards for its design, not simply its journalism.
In the course of the 20 years of Whitworth’s tenure as editor, The Atlantic was a finalist for dozens of Nationwide Journal Awards and the winner of 9. Invoice didn’t particularly relish the compliments that started to pour in, about how he had revived the “as soon as staid” Atlantic. He had gone again to look, he would clarify, and his three rapid predecessors had deservedly gained comparable accolades. It made you marvel, he mentioned, when the journal might have really been in that staid situation. In any case, he guessed, his personal years on the job would in the future develop into the staid foil to some successor’s resuscitation—and superb with him. So long as this stored taking place with each handover, it was excellent news for the journal.
Writers keep in mind Invoice’s conversations about articles as shrewd, mild, and affected person. His feedback on galley proofs, meant for a author’s editor alone, have been extra direct, generally requiring diplomatic translation earlier than being handed alongside. He wrote in pencil in a tiny however good script, a form of Twentieth-century Carolingian minuscule of his personal devising. There was one thing sacramental about the best way he labored: a single lamp illuminating a Thomas Moser desk, a galley earlier than him on a brown blotter, retractable pencil in hand, jacket off, bow tie safe, door ajar.
He had a reverence for editorial feedback on galleys, and as an instance some technical level as soon as pulled from a file drawer a galley of an article by A. J. Liebling coated with marginal feedback by William Shawn. His personal feedback ranged from small corrections to magisterial anathemas to sudden excursions into questions of tradition and journalism. Encountering a utilization that he merely wouldn’t enable—and there have been many, reminiscent of utilizing verbs like quipped and chortled; and utilizing satisfied once you meant persuaded; and utilizing human as a noun, as an alternative of human being—he would circle it and write within the margin, “Let’s don’t.” References to “the common American” have been banned, on the grounds that there is no such thing as a such factor. A author as soon as started a sentence with the phrase “Taking a deep breath that rounded out her cheeks like a trumpet participant’s …” Invoice famous the impossibility of that feat of inhalation with the phrases “Strive it.” One other author wished to make use of his nickname as a byline. Invoice circled the “Jeff” and wrote, “Ernie Hemingway, Bob Penn Warren, Invoice Faulkner, and Jim Joyce all advise towards this.” As he learn galleys, a phrase or phrase generally jogged a reminiscence and led to a ballooning remark within the margin, only for the file. A point out of Truman Capote’s In Chilly Blood prompted a word recounting a dialog through which Shawn expressed to Invoice a few of his misgivings about Capote’s work.
When Invoice favored an article, his reward was real however spare. He didn’t gush, telling writers that their work was “extraordinary” or “magnificent.” He most well-liked easy phrases with sturdy meanings. The apogee of his joyful response was a penciled “Good piece” on the final web page of a galley, phrases that editors generally lower out and despatched to the author in query. One editor, visiting a author at house, discovered the phrases framed and hanging on an workplace wall.
“Invoice expressed himself greatest on paper,” remembers Corby Kummer, who joined The Atlantic employees as a younger editor within the early Eighties.
In his notes on galley proofs of articles, every a grasp class in modifying, he was intimate, playful, affected person, impassioned. In individual, a really gradual burn. At our first assembly, in a midtown Manhattan Italian restaurant—he notably favored Italian eating places, I got here to be taught—I mentioned, by means of beginning a dialog, “It is a very business-lunch type of a spot.” Invoice checked out me and mentioned, “Properly, it is a enterprise lunch,” letting a silence fall. Throughout the primary course, he requested me what have been a few of my favourite books and authors. It was my flip to take a look at him. Had I ever, in actual fact, really learn a e-book? I used to be pretty certain I had, however might consider not one creator or one title. Lastly he described his enthusiasm for George Orwell, and I recalled that sure, I had learn and admired Down and Out in Paris and London. It was The Street to Wigan Pier he discovered exemplary, although. Naturally, I purchased it the following day.
A serious innovation that Invoice dropped at The Atlantic was a fact-checking division. At this journal as at most others, checking info had primarily been the area of copy editors, who regarded up names and dates in reference books. Too typically, Invoice would say, publications by default relied on a single tried-and-true manner of discovering whether or not one thing was fallacious: “by publishing it.” Invoice was formed by his expertise at The New Yorker, the place fact-checking had been intensive for many years. A checking division has been a part of The Atlantic’s DNA ever since. His angle towards its significance is tough to overstate. As soon as, on a galley proof, he reacted to a author’s assertion that the sanctity of info wasn’t a lot, however was all we had: “I can’t agree that the sanctity of info isn’t a lot. After Hitler, after the Moscow present trials and the opposite horrors of this century, info are treasured. In a single sense (science) they’re the very essence of Western civilization.” He paused, then continued together with his pencil on a brand new line: “Alternatively, the sanctity of info isn’t all now we have. We even have kindness, decency, youngsters, Bach, Beethoven, and many others.”
Yvonne Rolzhausen, at present the pinnacle of The Atlantic’s fact-checking division, remembers having Invoice by her aspect throughout one particularly tough episode:
I had simply began as a reality checker and was engaged on what was meant to be a lighter characteristic on the recognition of cosmetic surgery. We rapidly realized that it was, as an alternative, a contentious takedown of dangerous procedures and the surgeons performing them. Because the publication deadline approached, I had harrowing telephone calls with a screaming (and litigious) practitioner. Invoice spent many an hour strolling by the piece with me to see how I used to be doing. We’d sit at his desk, and he’d supply me vanilla sandwich cookies as I described the most recent threats. We delayed the piece twice whereas I labored away on it, however I’ll all the time be thankful for Invoice’s calm demeanor and assist.
One other innovation that Invoice dropped at The Atlantic—and that’s now not a part of its character—was a coverage of not holding editorial conferences. He most well-liked one-on-one engagements together with his editors. Like anybody, Invoice had his quirks, and perhaps that was considered one of them. When taking a author or an editor to lunch, he insisted on sitting aspect by aspect on the restaurant, relatively than throughout a desk. (He used the identical side-by-side configuration when assembly with writers in his workplace, sitting alongside the creator in a simple chair.) His framed memorabilia—together with the unique Bernard Fuchs drawing of Bishop Tomlinson, for that 1966 profile—leaned haphazardly towards a wall, by no means hung in 20 years. Invoice learn extensively about nutritional vitamins and different dietary supplements, his beliefs venturing at instances into speculative territory, a pharmacological Space 51; if you happen to’d been out with the flu, you would possibly return to search out pamphlets in your desk. He favored pigs, and revealed a fond and humorous article about them in 1971 that endures as a small traditional. He would order catfish every time he noticed it on a menu within the Northeast, however seemingly solely to verify that it didn’t measure as much as the bottom-feeding creatures present in Arkansas.
Invoice was specific about his deportment. He was as soon as found at his desk with a tailor’s tape, measuring the collar of a blue button-down shirt. He was satisfied—not persuaded however satisfied—that Brooks Brothers, in a misguided bid for modishness, had barely prolonged the purpose of the collar, leading to a modest outward bulge when the collar was buttoned down. Invoice described the consequence as a “midwestern roll,” as if this have been an age-old time period of artwork. He used that time period in his months-long correspondence with Brooks Brothers executives and with Alan Flusser, the creator of Garments and the Man: The Ideas of Positive Males’s Costume, whom Invoice sought to enlist as an skilled witness.
His information of jazz was profound. He had realized to play the trumpet at a younger age, and on the College of Oklahoma he’d had a band known as the Invoice Whitworth Orchestra. When he went to work on the Gazette, it meant spurning approaches from the Jimmy Dorsey and Stan Kenton bands. As a younger reporter, he had invited the trumpeter and band chief Dizzy Gillespie, whom he’d met at a efficiency in St. Louis, to return to Little Rock. Gillespie did, and stayed with Invoice and his mom. They remained mates. As Gillespie recalled later in a New Yorker article, Invoice wrote to him after the Little Rock go to to say that brass gamers from throughout had come to his house to “kiss the sheets.” Invoice’s style in decor would possibly run to beige partitions and Shaker minimalism, however music for him was pure shade. Terry Gross, the Recent Air host, remembers that Invoice would e mail about interstitial music on the present that he loved however couldn’t determine. (“He additionally urged me to maximise my consumption of Vitamin D, and begin taking Vitamin Ok, which I didn’t even know existed.”) To be invited to “hearken to some music” at his house wasn’t an informal expertise—it wasn’t drinks, small discuss, and one thing taking part in within the background. You sat subsequent to him in a high-backed chair towards an off-white wall, dealing with audio system that stood towards the unadorned reverse wall. On occasion, after some impressed solo, he would possibly flip his head to you briefly and nod.
In 1999, Mort Zuckerman offered The Atlantic to David Bradley, and Michael Kelly took over as editor. The journal would ultimately transfer to Washington, and Invoice himself would ultimately transfer again to Little Rock, the place he loved a detailed circle of mates. He didn’t retire. For some years he edited articles for The American Scholar. Rickety stacks of e-book manuscripts that he was modifying for publishers rose from the ground of his house. The books ranged from weighty historic tomes to the acclaimed memoirs (in two volumes) of Anjelica Huston. Anne Fadiman, a former editor of The American Scholar, paints a well-known portrait of Invoice at work:
When the creator of a chunk about which he was notably unenthusiastic used the verb “impress” with out a direct object, Invoice wrote within the margin, “This maddening use of transitive verbs as intransitive is a form of literary fungus unfold by reviewers and critics.” Subsequent to the commentary that beaks enabled early birds to catch their worms, he wrote, “Hmmm. Does this work out? All birds are enabled by their beaks. Early birds enabled by their earliness.” And under a simile he judged pointless, he wrote, “Look, Ma! I’m writing!”
Colleagues and mates usually made journeys to Little Rock and spent a day or two. There can be dinner with Arkansas mates. Some music. Some actual catfish. And Invoice was out there for recommendation from afar, modifying the work of writers he admired. Holly Brubach, lately at work on a biography, would ship Invoice every chapter as she completed it, after which they’d discuss for hours by telephone:
Sometimes, over the course of those marathon telephone classes, we’d stray from the paragraph at hand and retrieve some small expertise that had lodged itself in considered one of our reminiscences, and I relished these interruptions, as if we’d stopped for a picnic by the aspect of the highway. Invoice would supply a glimpse of the younger man he’d been earlier than occupying the pedestal on which I and so many others had positioned him. One in every of these tales, previous to his profession in journalism again east, concerned being a younger pickup musician in Little Rock, the place he and a good friend had landed a gig taking part in for Mitzi Gaynor, on the town together with her personal present. She had good legs. After rehearsal, he’d knocked on her dressing-room door. “Oh, hiya,” she greeted him, “you’re the man on trumpet,” earlier than politely declining no matter it was he was proposing. “You see that man over there?” she requested. “He’s my supervisor, and he’s additionally my husband, and if I have been to simply accept your invitation, he would kill us each.” Invoice was in fact gracious within the face of rejection. She shook her head, and, as he walked away, he heard her say to nobody specifically, “It’s all the time the saxophonists and the trumpeters.”
