Edwin Yoder, 89; Pulitzer-winning editorial writer

Edwin M. Yoder Jr., a journalist who won the Pulitzer Prize for his stylish and erudite editorials at the now-defunct Washington Star and went on to become a columnist syndicated by The Washington Post Writers Group, died Nov. 30 at a retirement community in Chapel Hill, N.C. He was 89.

His daughter, Anne D. Yoder, confirmed the death but did not provide further details.

By the time he retired from regular column-writing in 1996, Mr. Yoder was “a certifiable journalistic fossil,” as he put it, “a survivor from the linear age whose tenure has extended into the garish and glamorous electronic era of television, talking heads, talk radio, and the Internet.”

Mr. Yoder, a political moderate, got his start at newspapers in his home state of North Carolina, where he wrote editorials in support of the civil rights movement and evoked the region’s history and culture while channeling the work of W.J. Cash and C. Vann Woodward, two leading chroniclers of the South.

His work attracted the attention of Texas financier Joe L. Allbritton, the new owner of the Star, who was seeking to rejuvenate the scrappy afternoon newspaper when he hired Mr. Yoder in 1975 to oversee its editorial page.

Mr. Yoder joined a staff that included Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Mary McGrory, and in 1979 he was awarded a Pulitzer of his own, hailed by the prize committee for writing about “current national events with the confident understanding of the political specialist, the objectivity of the historian, and with masterful literary grace.”

That work included a piece grappling with Russian novelist and dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s critique of “Western decadence,” as well as editorials about Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, the antismoking campaign of Health, Education, and Welfare Secretary Joseph Califano, and the retirement of segregationist Senator James O. Eastland, the Mississippi Democrat.

“He was an elegant writer, as gifted as they come,” said Alan Shearer, who edited many of Mr. Yoder’s columns in the 1990s as editorial director of The Post Writers Group.

“Everything he wrote — a message, a letter, a column — was well crafted,” Shearer added in a phone interview. “You really couldn’t improve his prose.”

Mr. Yoder joined the Writers Group in 1981, when the Star folded under its latest owner, Time Inc. He wrote a nationally syndicated column for the next 15 years, filing “1,500 pieces and more than a million words of comment,” by his count, “on everything from Gorbachev to goobers.”

While exploring questions of politics, education, literature, and the law (the Supreme Court was a favorite topic, Justice Lewis F. Powell a regular lunch companion), Mr. Yoder cited historians, novelists, scholars, and other thinkers, including Proust, Freud, and Faulkner.

He also showed a fondness for experimentation. One of his early editorials was written in the style of the King James Bible (improbably, it was a response to Senator Hubert Humphrey’s decision not to run for president in 1976), while another piece was structured as a “a self-interview” about Shakespeare’s work and legacy. It began:

“Q. A self-interview about Shakespeare on his 415th birthday? What are your qualifications?” “A. Only that I’m human and able to read; otherwise, meager.”

Mr. Yoder was a notable early champion of Bill Clinton, arguing in a September 1991 column — one month before the Arkansas governor announced his candidacy for president — that Clinton was “the most engaging extemporaneous speaker in American politics” and had “the heart, the talent and, yes, the vision for the job.”

Mr. Yoder could be incisive in his critiques of fellow pundits, especially in retirement. He published a wry memoir, “Telling Others What to Think” (2004), lamenting the decline of daily newspapers and the rise of confrontational cable television shows, and later criticized the proliferation of “hearsay and rumor” online, where he saw few signs of civil discourse.

“We have seen the future,” he said in a 2016 speech at the University of North Carolina, “and, alas, it is the Drudge Report.”