L. Rust Hills, Esquire's Fiction Editor Published Best American Authors, 83
DGH
http://www.latimes.com/news/obituaries/la-me-hills16-2008aug16,0,5253292.story
L. Rust Hills, 83; Esquire's fiction editor published best American
authors
By Dennis McLellan, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
L. Rust Hills, the former longtime fiction editor at Esquire who was
known for publishing the work of the best American writers during his
30 years at the magazine, has died. He was 83.
Hills, a resident of Key West, Florida, died of cardiac arrest Tuesday
[August 12, 2008] after collapsing during a visit to Belfast, Maine,
said his wife of 34 years, author Joy Williams.
"Over the course of five decades, he was one of, if not the, greatest
fiction editors in magazines," Will Blythe, a former literary editor
at Esquire who worked with Hills for 10 years beginning in the late
'80s, told The Times on Friday [August 15, 2008].
Hills began working at Esquire as fiction editor in 1957. He left in
1964 to become fiction editor at the Saturday Evening Post and
returned to Esquire for an 11-month stint beginning in 1969.
Returning to Esquire again in 1977, he remained at the magazine until
1999.
Writer Gay Talese, who knew Hills at Esquire in the '60s and had some
of his nonfiction pieces edited by Hills, described him as "a man who
cared greatly about stature and status in the world of fiction."
"He wasn't interested in commercial fiction," Talese told The Times.
"He was interested in the standards of serious literature, and he
tried to, in a commercial magazine, impose upon its pages some of the
lofty notions he had about the written word."
During Hills' years as fiction editor at Esquire, the magazine
published the work of literary heavyweights such as Philip Roth, John
Cheever, Norman Mailer, William Styron, Raymond Carver, Don DeLillo,
Bruce Jay Friedman, E. Annie Proulx and Ann Beattie.
"He basically was, from the beginning, a champion of literary
fiction," Blythe said. "Not gimmick fiction, not slick fiction --
literary fiction.
"When Arnold Gingrich started Esquire back in the '30s, the magazine
published some very good writers such as [Ernest] Hemingway and [F.
Scott] Fitzgerald, but by the time Rust arrived [in 1957] I think it
was publishing fiction that was nowhere near as good, at least on a
consistent basis, as what Rust was about to bring to the magazine,"
Blythe said.
Hills, Blythe said, "believed in fiction as, I think, the ultimate
creative expression.
"I once saw him tell an editor in chief of the magazine that he could
show him exactly why a story was superb. And at that moment, he was
waving at the editor a heavily annotated manuscript that was full of
what looked like equations and all sorts of markings. He had spent a
lot of time marking it up so he could show exactly why it was a superb
piece of work that deserved to be in the magazine, and he was waving
it like a battle flag.
"He really did believe a good short story was the ultimate feature of
a magazine, no matter what reader surveys showed."
Hills was known not only as a meticulous editor of short stories at
Esquire, but also for his brilliance in excerpting novels for the
magazine, including Styron's "Sophie's Choice" and Richard Ford's
"Independence Day."
"He thought that that was the most skillful thing that he did," Ford
told The Times on Friday. "Being able to excerpt bits from novels so
that they'd resemble short stories was the height, in some ways, of
the magazine editor's art."
Ford said Hills published "the first good short story I wrote" --
'Rock Springs' in 1981 -- "and told me if I would write good short
stories he would publish them. It was extremely encouraging to me.
Esquire to me at the time was the place that you really wanted to
publish fiction."
Hills "really loved to read, and his tastes were extremely wide," Ford
said. "Being a fiction editor for a publisher or a magazine is a very
difficult job. But Rust never got jaded ever in his life about reading
fiction -- ever, ever. To his last breath, he saw the world through
the optic of good fiction."
Among Hills' accomplishments at Esquire was conceiving a literary
issue of the magazine in 1963 that included short stories, author
interviews, a photo essay on writers' lives, a profile by Talese of
the literary crowd involved with the Paris [Fance] Review and a
diagram of "The Structure of the American Literary Establishment."
Hills also commissioned Mailer to write the novel "An American Dream,"
which Hills edited and Esquire serialized.
"He retained until the end of his life really a passionate enthusiasm
for new writers," Blythe said. "And not only that, once he had taken a
shine to them, he would slip some impoverished writers little gifts of
money. He once said to one, 'We don't want our writers going hungry.'
And he'd do it in a very inconspicuous way. He put his money where his
mouth was on that."
Talese recalled that, although he knew and worked with Hills in the
1960s, "he was not a man of the '60s. He was a guy who looked like he
belonged to the '30s.
"He wore bow ties, and he didn't have a walking stick, but you
imagined he'd be very comfortable with one. What he was, was an old-
fashioned gentleman."
Blythe agreed, saying, "I always felt he was transplanted from another
generation of editors." Hills "was a very charming, gracious guy," but
"he also had a bite to him."
"We once had a shouting match on the phone over whether Norman Mailer
or Saul Bellow was the better writer and deserved to be at the top of
a pyramid we were putting together ranking nearly all the major
writers in America."
He was born Lawrence Rust Hills on November 9, 1924, in Brooklyn, New
York, where he grew up.
After attending the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy at Kings Point, New
York, he served in the merchant marine during World War II. He earned
a bachelor's degree in 1948 at Wesleyan University in Middletown,
Connecticut, and a master's in 1949.
Hills was the author of three books of personal essays in the '70s:
"How to do things right: The revelations of a fussy man," "How to
retire at forty-one: Or, dropping out of the rat race without going
down the drain," and "How to be good: Or, the somewhat tricky business
of attaining moral virtue in a society that's not just corrupt but
corrupting, without being completely out-of-it."
He also wrote "Writing in general and the short story in particular,"
a 1977 book that is used in college creative writing classes and is
still in print.
In addition to his wife, the twice-divorced Hills is survived by a
daughter, Caitlin Hills; and a grandson.
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