Writer and editor William Whitworth, who "wrote revealing profiles in the New Yorker giving voice to his idiomatic subjects and polished the prose of some of the nation's celebrated writers as its associate editor before transplanting that magazine's painstaking standards to the Atlantic, where he was editor in chief for 20 years," died March 8, the New York Times reported. He was 87.
Giving up a promising career as a jazz trumpeter after college, he worked for the Arkansas Gazette and later the New York Herald Tribune. In 1966, William Shawn, the New Yorker's legendary editor, hired Whitworth, who "injected wit into pensive 'Talk of the Town' vignettes. He also profiled the famous and the not so famous, including the jazz greats Dizzy Gillespie and Charles Mingus (accompanied by photos from his former Herald Tribune colleague Jill Krementz) and the foreign policy adviser Eugene V. Rostow," the Times noted, adding that Whitworth expanded his profile of Rostow into a 1970 book, Naïve Questions About War and Peace.
From 1973 through 1980 at the New Yorker, then at the Atlantic Monthly, where he was editor until retiring in 1999, and later when he worked on books, Whitworth was most valued as a nonfiction editor. "Apart from the writers he shepherded, prodded and protected, his role was largely unheralded outside the publishing industry. To colleagues who often wondered why he abandoned reporting, he suggested that he couldn't lick 'em, so he joined then: He had simply become fed up with editors, newspaper editors in particular, mangling his prose which would nonetheless be published under his byline," the Times wrote.
"You want to fail on your own terms, not in somebody else's voice that sounds like you," he said at the Oxford American Summit for Ambitious Writers in 2011.
Whitworth edited "implacable perfectionists" like the film critic Pauline Kael and author Robert A. Caro, who was eventually so satisfied with the final excerpts from The Power Broker, published in the New Yorker, that when the Atlantic published a condensation of the first volume of his Lyndon B. Johnson biography, Caro asked Whitworth to edit it.
Essayist Anne Fadiman, who worked with him at the American Scholar after he left the Atlantic, said that for Whitworth, "editing was a conversation and also a form of teaching."
Garrison Keillor credited him with a life-altering decision, recalling that after writing an article for the New Yorker about the Grand Ole Opry, "he pushed me to do a Saturday night variety show myself, patterned on the Opry, which led to A Prairie Home Companion, which provided me with employment for years to come. Unusual. Like a sportswriter becoming a major league pitcher, or an obit writer opening a mortuary. I've been grateful ever since."
Literary agent Lynn Nesbit remembered Whitworth as a "stunningly brilliant and discerning 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 Whitworth, unlike Shawn, "was more beloved than feared."