EDITED NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS
NEW YORK — Robert B. Silvers, the exacting and perpetual editor of The New York Review of Books who responded to private groaning over the state of criticism and helped create a literary magazine of lasting influence, died Monday at age 87.
Mr. Silvers, who had served as sole editor of the Review after fellow founder Barbara Epstein died in 2006, died at his home in Manhattan after a brief illness. The publication confirmed his death to The Associated Press after sending an announcement on Twitter.
The Review was conceived in late 1962, in the midst of a newspaper strike in New York, when poet Robert Lowell and his wife, the author and critic Elizabeth Hardwick, met at the Upper West Side apartment of Barbara and Jason Epstein, a publishing executive. They shared an old lament — the dreadfulness of book reviews— and saw a chance to change it.
Lowell secured a loan of $ 4,000 and Mr. Silvers, with Harper’s at the time, was brought in as co- editor. The first issue of the Review came out in 1963, with the declaration that no time would be wasted on books “trivial in their intentions or venal in their effects, except occasionally to reduce a temporarily inflated reputation or call attention to a fraud.” Norman Mailer, William Styron and others quickly agreed to write for the new publication though they initially weren’t paid.
Widely appreciated and honored, the Review has published classic essays by Mailer, Joan Didion, Susan Sontag and Gore Vidal, among others, and even managed to turn a profit. “The Fifty Year Argument,” a documentary co- directed by Martin Scorsese and David Tedeschi, came out in 2014. Two years earlier, Mr. Silvers received a National Humanities Medal andwas praised as “a bringer of culture, a champion of literature, a uniquely talented matchmaker of books and reviewers.”
The Review did not immediately announce a successor.
“It seems impossible to replace him,” Jason Epstein, who had remained close to Mr. Silvers, told the AP. “He was a genius. Asking what made him special is like asking what made Picasso special. Only he and Barbara could have accomplished what they did.”
The NYRB was not above being criticized, with some calling it elitist, insular and prone to running far more work by men than by women. Tom Wolfe mocked it as “the chief theoretical organ of Radical Chic,” while Saul Bellow labeled it the New York Review of each other’s books. The Review itself was quite capable of attack, whether it was Noam Chomsky and I. F. Stone taking on the Vietnam War, Mailer sticking it to Mary McCarthy’s “The Group” or McCarthy giving the ax to David Halberstam’s “The Best and the Brightest.” The magazine also was an early opponent of the Iraq war and a frequent critic of Donald Trump.
In 2012, accepting an honorary award from the National Book Critics Circle, Mr. Silvers said that while the Review avoided editorials, its stance fromthe beginning was “to be skeptical of state power and to take the side of people who had suffered from it.” State power, in turn, suspected the Review. An FBI report from the 1960s cited Mr. Silvers for using “individuals with ‘ leftist tendencies’ to review books dealing with security matters and the U. S. government.”
The Review never rested. For decades, Mr. Silvers and Barbara Epstein presided lovingly over every word and punctuation mark, every cover and every assignment, with the imposing, Anglicized Mr. Silvers ( Wolfe once wrote that Mr. Silvers’ accent “arrived mysteriously one day in a box from London”) specializing in politics and history and science, and the short, outgoing Epstein in fiction and the arts.
A lifelong bachelor, Mr. Silvers was an opera fan and socialite who lived on Park Avenue with Grace, Countess of Dudley, widow of the 3rd Earl of Dudley, who died last year. Their friends included George Plimpton, Katharine Graham and Peter Duchin.
A businessman’s son, Silvers was born in Mineola, New York, and grew up on a farm in Huntington. He was an early reader who absorbed books of all sorts with the urgency of gulping down water. By 15, he had been admitted to the University of Chicago and he needed just 2 ½ years to graduate.
In his 20s, he served as press secretary for Connecticut Gov. Chester Bowles, worked in the Paris offices of NATO and was an editor for The Paris Review. He was an assistant editor at Harper’s when Jason Epstein called and asked him to join The New York Review of Books. As Mr. Silvers recalled, his editor at Harper’s wished him luck and predicted he’d be back in amonth.