Editor who shaped The Atlantic’s writing, readers’ tastes
A serious enough trumpet player that he left college to hit the road with a jazz ensemble, William Whitworth brought more than a fan’s fascination to the 1969 New Yorker magazine profile he wrote about Bernie Glow, an accomplished session musician.
By then Mr. Whitworth had set aside hopes of making a living performing, but the experience gave him a keen sense of what separated trumpet virtuosos like Glow from players like himself.
It was more than simply talent, said Mr. Whitworth, who tucked into the profile an observation that illuminated all creative endeavors, including the writing and editing that became his life’s work: “To oversimplify it, some trumpet players play with taste but not enough strength, and others have the strength but lack the taste. The lead player must have both.”
Mr. Whitworth, who as editor-in-chief of The Atlantic magazine for nearly two decades guided some of the nation’s best writers to publish their most noteworthy work, died March 8 in Conway, Ark., where he was recuperating in a rehabilitation facility from a series of falls and surgeries.
He was 87 and had lived in Little Rock since not long after leaving The Atlantic in 1999.
Fondly remembered by colleagues for his gracious demeanor and his sharp editing pencil, he shaped and improved writing at The Atlantic and at The New Yorker magazine before that — helping good writers become great, and great writing become enduring.
His early career included writing for the New York Herald Tribune in the late newspaper’s legendary era when its writers included Tom Wolfe, and when Mr. Whitworth’s assignments included covering The Beatles’ 1964 visit for a milestone appearance on “The Ed Sullivan Show.”
At Manhattan’s Plaza Hotel, “the Beatles registered under their individual names, rather than as a group,” Mr. Whitworth wrote. “The hotel knew only, from checking an English source, that the boys were ‘financially responsible,’ which is a masterpiece of understatement even by British standards.”
Moving to The New Yorker in 1966, he wrote memorable profiles of subjects such as TV talk show host Joe Franklin before becoming an editor “who could see around
corners and beyond writers’ horizons and deep into thorny manuscripts,” Ian Frazier wrote in the magazine’s tribute.
“Everyone who worked with him will also tell you that he was a prince of a fellow,” Frazier wrote. “Throughout publishing you could not find anybody more beloved.”
Mort Zuckerman, who then owned The Atlantic, twice tried to hire Mr. Whitworth as editorin-chief. A presumed successor to William Shawn, The New Yorker’s top editor, Mr. Whitworth said no at first, but then was named The Atlantic’s editor in September 1980.
He stayed until Zuckerman sold the magazine and the next owner brought in a new editor, in 1999.
Mr. Whitworth brought a trio of talents to editing The Atlantic “that don’t often go together,” said Cullen Murphy, who worked for him as the magazine’s managing editor during most of his tenure.
“The first one was simply his skill at editing word by word and sentence by sentence, and his fastidious attention to the nuts and bolts of meaning and usage,” said Murphy, who is now an editor-at-large for the magazine.
Richard Todd, a former senior editor who died in 2019, wrote that “The Atlantic, under Whitworth’s direction, went on to become what was, at least at the level of sentence and paragraph, the best-edited magazine in America.”
Notes that Mr. Whitworth wrote in the margins of manuscripts, in handwriting that was as remarkably legible as it was astonishingly small, sometimes pointed out arcane and important grammar violations with a clipped “See Fowler” — a reference to “Fowler’s Modern English Usage.”
Mr. Whitworth’s second skill, Murphy said, “came on a different level altogether, which had to do with how you shape a piece of writing in the macro sense: how it holds together as a piece of architecture, or, maybe if you’re dealing with a smaller piece, with a piece of jewelry.”
The third skill concerned Mr. Whitworth’s sense of which writers should tackle which subjects as he established “what was The Atlantic’s proper territory and what wasn’t,” Murphy recalled.
“Bill seemed to have a kind of prophetic vision for finding the stories that were going to be relevant in a year, or for finding the stories that were already in the news, but that nobody really understood and that we would still need to understand months and years down the road,” he said.
High on that list was “The Education of David Stockman,” William Greider’s December 1981 article about Reagan administration budget director David Stockman, who conceded that he had doubts about supply-side economics — known as the “trickle-down” theory that big tax cuts for the wealthy and rich corporations will benefit the middle-class, working-class, and poor.
“None of us really understands what’s going on with all these numbers,” Stockman told Greider in an article that for a time lodged The Atlantic on newspaper front pages and TV nightly news shows.
Characteristically, Mr. Whitworth preferred that the spotlight of attention for the article’s enormous impact fall elsewhere.
“I can’t really claim much credit,” he told The New York Times, “except that I’m not stupid enough to turn away a good idea.”
William Alvin Whitworth was born on Feb. 13, 1937, in Hot Springs, Ark., and spent most of his childhood and youth in Little Rock.
His father, William Cecil Whitworth, was an advertising executive, and his mother, Lois McNabb Whitworth, was the china and silver buyer at a store whose customers included Bill Clinton, who she helped choose jewelry for Hillary.
Mr. Whitworth began playing trumpet in high school and set aside studies at the University of Oklahoma to tour with a six-piece jazz ensemble before returning to finish a bachelor’s degree.
In 1969, he married Carolyn Hubbard and they had two children. She died in 2005 and their son, Matthew, died in 2022.
“He always included us in the things he cared about, the things of his life, be that taking us to jazz clubs to see his favorite performers or calling up just to share a funny or finely crafted sentence from something he was reading or working on,” wrote his daughter, Katherine Whitworth Stewart of Little Rock, in an email.
In her own editing work, she would call to discuss a “sentence problem,” and they would “work the sentence back and forth until we’d settled on a rewrite that would fix it without changing it too much to upset the author. Those were some of my favorite conversations; I imagine writers and editors he worked with had many similar ones.”
In addition to Katherine, Mr. Whitworth leaves a half-brother, F. Brooks Whitworth, of Centennial, Colo., and a half-sister, Sharon Persichitti of Dallas.
A celebration in Little Rock of Mr. Whitworth’s life will be announced. Plans also are being made for a gathering on the East Coast.
“I thought he was an extraordinarily fine editor for The Atlantic,” said Tracy Kidder, whose articles for the magazine became some of his most important books. “He was a literate, civilized voice.”
Mr. Whitworth “was infinitely patient, understanding, and supportive,” said Corby Kummer, a former Atlantic senior editor who is now executive director of the Food & Society program at the Aspen Institute.
“And the level of sheer technical skill he passed on about editing and writing in every marked galley was so extraordinarily high that all of us who worked there knew we would never have an opportunity for an education like this again,” Kummer said. “We worked in an earthly paradise.”