Theodore Solotaroff; Founder of The New American Review (NY Times)
Hyfler/Rosner
Theodore Solotaroff, Founder of The New American Review, Is
Dead at 80
By WILLIAM GRIMES
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/12/books/12solotaroff.html?pagewanted=print
Theodore Solotaroff, who in 1967 started The New American
Review as a highly unusual showcase for a rising generation
of writers, including Philip Roth, William H. Gass and
Mordechai Richler in just the first issue, died on Friday at
his home in East Quogue, N.Y. He was 80.
The cause was complications of pneumonia, said his son
Jason.
The New American Review, which dropped the "New" along the
way, operated as a kind of open house for fiction writers
and practitioners of the new journalism. A literary journal
produced as a paperback book (with a paperback price), its
first issue offered readers the work of 29 writers, not only
fiction but also nonfiction by Conor Cruise O'Brien, Stanley
Kauffmann and Theodore Roszak.
For the next decade, with many a financial hiccup, The New
American Review, whose back-cover blurb proclaimed it "a
writer's magazine for the new literary audience," presented
Americans and scattered foreigners (including the
then-unknown Ian McEwan), as well as cultural journalism.
Nearly all of it was filtered through the fine-tuned
sensibilities of Mr. Solotaroff.
Its politics, if it had any, were vaguely liberal, its
aspirations lofty but nonspecific.
In an editor's note, Mr. Solotaroff announced that his
publication would studiously avoid "the tendency toward cult
and coterie by which literary magazines usually define their
particular territory and assert their standards." It would
not be, in other words, Partisan Review or Commentary.
Instead, with mass-market print runs of more than 100,000,
it would appeal to an untapped audience ready to savor the
finest in current fiction and journalism executed with
literary flair. Mr. Solotaroff believed, incorrectly, that
this formula could be a paying proposition.
Issued three times a year, The New American Review was less
a magazine with recognizable departments and columnists than
a rolling literary anthology that accommodated fiction
writers as diverse as Donald Barthelme, Michael Herr, E. L.
Doctorow, Harold Brodkey and Robert Coover. In its pages,
readers encountered Kate Millett on sexual politics, Norman
Mailer on Henry Miller, A. Alvarez on Sylvia Plath and
Michael Rossman on the spiritual satisfactions of building
your own geodesic dome.
Mr. McEwan, in a blurb he wrote for Mr. Solotaroff's essay
collection "The Literary Community," said that "as the most
influential editor of his time, he shaped not only the
tastes, but the direction of American writing."
Theodore Solotaroff, known as Ted, was born and raised in
Elizabeth, N.J., where his father owned a plate-glass
company that yielded scant income during the Depression. A
tyrant of mythic proportions, Ben Solotaroff brutalized his
sensitive, artistic wife, Rose, and beat Ted, often
threatening "to break your spirit once and for all," Mr.
Solotaroff recalled in his first memoir, "Truth Comes in
Blows."
Both parents left their mark. "He was an odd combination of
ferocity and tenderness," said his son Paul, a senior writer
for Rolling Stone and Men's Journal. "His sons saw the
former and his writers the latter."
After serving in the Navy after high school, Mr. Solotaroff,
a rabid sports fan, entered the University of Michigan,
whose football games he had often listened to on the radio.
He played basketball as a freshman and earned a degree in
English.
He also married a fellow student, Lynn Ringler. The marriage
ended in divorced, and she died in 1994. His marriages to
Shirley Fingerhood and Ghislaine Boulanger, both of
Manhattan, ended in divorce.
In addition to his sons Paul, of Brooklyn, and Ivan, of New
Town, Pa., both from his first marriage, he is survived by
his sons Jason, of Montclair, N.J., from his marriage to Ms.
Fingerhood, and Isaac, of Brooklyn, from his marriage to Ms.
Boulanger; his wife, Virginia Solotaroff of East Quogue; a
brother, Robert, of Minneapolis; and six grandchildren.
After college, Mr. Solotaroff headed to New York to make his
way as a writer. Instead he waited tables. Discouraged, he
entered the University of Chicago and had nearly completed a
dissertation on Henry James when fate derailed his planned
academic career.
Mr. Roth, a fellow student, recommended him to the editor of
The Times Literary Supplement, who wanted an essay on
American Jewish writers. Mr. Solotaroff's contribution
caught the eye of Norman Podhoretz, the editor of
Commentary, who hired him as an editor at the magazine in
1960.
After several years at Commentary (which was steering
politically rightward under Mr. Podhoretz and whose internal
dramas provided the backdrop for a further volume of memoirs
Mr. Solotaroff was writing at the time of his death), he
became editor of Book Week, the Sunday book supplement of
The New York Herald Tribune.
When The Herald Tribune closed, in 1966, Mr. Solotaroff
found work at the New American Library, a publisher of
quality paperbacks. There he proposed a thick literary
magazine along the lines of The Anchor Review, once
published by Doubleday, and New World Writing, published by
the New American Library in the 1950s. Stanley Moss was
hired as its poetry editor, succeeded by Richard Howard.
Although a critical success, the magazine struggled
financially. In 1970 New American Library withdrew its
support. Simon & Schuster and later Bantam stepped into the
breach, but in 1977, with Issue No. 26, the magazine
breathed its last, after publishing the work of 500
different writers, 200 short stories, 300 poems and 130
essays.
Mr. Solotaroff went to work as an editor at Harper & Row,
now HarperCollins, where he edited Russell Banks, Sue
Miller, Max Apple and Bobbie Ann Mason. Ms. Mason, in a
telephone interview, called him "one of the last of the
great editors," someone who "cared about every line."
After retiring, he worked on his memoirs. A second
installment, "First Loves," appeared in 2003. His essays
have been collected in several volumes, including "The Red
Hot Vacuum" and "A Few Good Voices in My Head."
"He had very high expectations of himself," said his son
Jason. "Unfortunately these extended to the golf course. He
could never believe that he hit the ball as badly as he
did."