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Felker Built New York Magazine

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The Tampa Tribune

Published: July 2, 2008

Clay Felker, 82, the far-sighted editor who founded New York magazine and helped launch the "New Journalism" of the 1960s, with its novelistic techniques and strong point of view, died Tuesday in New York of throat and mouth cancer.

By defining the form of the modern city magazine, and by encouraging writers to address modern life in a bold, vividly descriptive style, Felker was one of the most influential journalists of his time.

His first triumphs came in the mid-1960s, when he was editor of New York, originally the Sunday magazine of the New York Herald Tribune newspaper.

He gave writers such as Tom Wolfe and Jimmy Breslin the freedom to roam the city and write as they pleased, making the colorful supplement "the hippest Sunday reading in town," as Newsweek put it.

When the newspaper folded in 1967, Felker used his severance pay to buy the magazine's name and secured more than $1 million in financing to rebuild New York as a glossy weekly publication.

When it debuted on April 8, 1968, it was not an immediate success, but Felker soon found an innovative formula that would inspire imitators around the world.

Felker was later forced out of New York magazine, and in 1977 he became publisher and part-owner of Esquire. It was sold two years later.

The Washington Post

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