William Whitworth, respected writer and editor, has died aged 87

William Whitworth, who wrote revealing profiles in The New Yorker expressing his idiomatic subjects and honed the prose of some of the country’s celebrated writers as an associate editor before bringing that magazine’s meticulous standards to The Atlantic, where he was editor-in-chief for twenty years, died Friday in Conway, Ark., near Little Rock. He was 87.

His daughter, Katherine Whitworth Stewart, announced the death. She said he was treated at a hospital after several falls and surgeries.

As a young college graduate, Mr. Whitworth left a promising career as a jazz trumpeter to pursue a different kind of improvisation as a journalist.

He reported breaking news for The Arkansas Gazette and later for 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 prim but dictatorial editor of The New Yorker, invited Mr. Whitworth to the venerated weekly. He took the job even though he had already accepted one at The New York Times.

At The New Yorker, he injected humor into pensive “Talk of the Town” vignettes. He also profiled the well-known and the lesser-known, including jazz greats Dizzy Gillespie and Charles Mingus (accompanied by photos by his former Herald Tribune colleague Jill Krementz) and foreign policy adviser Eugene V. Rostow. He expanded his profile of Mr. Rostow into a 1970 book, “Naïve Questions about War and Peace.”

Mr. Whitworth provided ample opportunity for each individual he profiled to be quoted, and provided each with equally ample petards on which to hoist himself.

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 president of a flock of the Church of God, had declared himself King of the World. Bishop Tomlinson claimed millions of church members – including all Pentecostals. “He thinks they are his,” Mr. Whitworth wrote, “whether they know it or not.”

Of Joe Franklin, the enduring television and radio host, Mr. Whitworth wrote in 1971 that his office “if it were a person, it would be a bum” — but that “on the air, Joe is more cheerful and positive than Norman.” Vincent Peale and Lawrence Welk combined.”

From 1973 to 1980 at The New Yorker 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 respected as a nonfiction editor.

Aside from the writers he guided, encouraged, and protected, his role outside the publishing world was largely unknown. To colleagues who often wondered why he had given up reporting, he suggested that he couldn’t lick them, so he joined then: he had simply grown tired of editors, especially newspaper editors, mangling his prose, that would nevertheless be published under his direction. byline.

“You want to fail on your own terms, not with the voice of someone else who looks like you,” he said at the meeting Oxford American Summit for Aspiring Writers in 2011.

Mr. Whitworth edited in grim perfectionists like film critic Pauline Kael (who nearly came to blows with Mr. Shawn) and Robert A. Caro (who was ultimately so pleased with the final excerpts from “The Power Broker,” his biography of Robert Moses , published in The New Yorker — after Mr. Whitworth intervened with Mr. Shawn — that when The Atlantic published a summary of the first volume of his Lyndon B. Johnson biography, he asked Mr. Whitworth to edit it).

How did he win over recalcitrant writers?

“As long as you kept them in the game and didn’t do things behind their backs, and slowly explained why this would help them, whatever it would do, it protected them and not us, and they came around,” he said. the Oxford American Summit.

For Mr. Whitworth, said the 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.”

At times, Mr. Whitworth offered wise counsel that went beyond editing.

After Garrison Keillor wrote an article for The New Yorker about the Grand Ole Opry, “he pushed me to do a Saturday night variety show of my own, modeled on the Opry, which led to ‘A Prairie Home Companion,’ which is my work for years to come,” Mr. Keillor said by email. “Unusual. Like a sportswriter who becomes a major league pitcher, or an obituary writer who opens a mortuary. I’ve been grateful ever since.”

New Yorker writer Hendrik Hertzberg wrote on his blog in 2011 that, despite Mr. Whitworth’s capacity for self-deprecation, he and Mr. Shawn had much in common, “including a gentle manner, a keen understanding of writerly 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 be succeeded. Rather than being complicit in what he described to a friend as “parricide” in a plot to oust Mr. Shawn, he accepted the editorship of The Atlantic from its new owner, Mortimer Zuckerman. He didn’t regret it.

“I got over The New Yorker a long time ago.” he wrote in a letter to Corby Kummer, former editor-in-chief and food columnist at The Atlantic — which, he said, “fulfilled all my expectations and hopes.”

“I couldn’t have been so happy and proud in any other job,” he added.

Under Mr. Whitworth’s editorship, The Atlantic won nine National Magazine Awards, including the 1993 Citation for Overall Excellence.

He also spent months editing copy of Renée C. Fox’s “In the Field: A Sociologist’s Journey” (2011) in a mail exchange that lasted for months without them ever meeting in person.

Mr. Whitworth’s suggestions, Professor Fox recalled Commentary in 2011, “are usually written in his characteristic spicy style, always courteous, friendly and modest in tone, sometimes self-mockery and often dryly witty.”

“The editor,” she continued, “taught the author about intellectual, grammatical, aesthetic, historical, and moral components of writing and editing that were previously imperceptible or unknown to her.”

William Alvin Whitworth was born on February 13, 1937 in Hot Springs, Ark. His mother, Lois (McNabb) Whitworth, was a china and silver buyer at Cave’s Jewelers (where she often assisted Bill Clinton in buying gifts for Hillary). His father, William C. Whitworth, was an advertising executive.

He attended Central High School while working part-time as a copy boy in the advertising department of The Arkansas Democrat. After graduating, he studied 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 their daughter, he is survived by a half-brother, F. Brooks Whitworth. A son, Matthew, died in 2022. Mr. Whitworth had lived in Conway since retiring from The Atlantic.

Literary agent Lynn Nesbit remembered Mr. Whitworth as a “stunningly brilliant and critical editor” whose “own ego never got in the way of his editorial genius.” Charles McGrath, another former New Yorker editor who later edited The New York Times Book Review, said that Mr. Whitworth, unlike Mr. Shawn, was “more loved than feared.”

But he was not a braggart. Although he often quoted Mr. Shawn as saying that “the failure to achieve perfection is merely an endless process,” he more or less replicated what he called The New Yorker’s “neurotic system” of meticulous editing at The Atlantic.

“He taught me that the worst approach for an editor is to do your entire piece with your hands in the hair because you knew how to organize and write it better,” says Mr. Kummer, who is now executive director of Food & Society at the Aspen Institute. .

“The writer’s name was on the piece, not yours,” he continued, “and no matter how fierce the arguments about phrasing, punctuation, paragraph order, or word choice, the writer had to be happy with a piece or it wouldn’t to work. .”

When he assigned Mr. Kummer to edit an article by George F. Kennan, the eminent diplomat and historian, Mr. Whitworth warned Mr. Kummer in no uncertain terms: “No matter how much work you think is needed, remember: he is a giant. ”

But when Mr. Kennan later complained that Mr. Kummer “gave me as much trouble as he gave The New Yorker,” Mr. Whitworth responded, “That’s exactly what I pay him for.”