From a New York Times obit by Sam Roberts headlined “Daniel Menaker, Who Edited With Flair and Wrote With Wit, Dies at 79”:
Daniel Menaker, who incubated literary celebrities as executive editor in chief of Random House and as a senior fiction editor of The New Yorker, and who, as a wry and discerning stylist, became a critically praised author himself, died on Monday at his home in New Marlborough, Mass. . . .
Mentored at The New Yorker by the storied editors William Shawn and William Maxwell, Mr. Menaker oversaw mostly fiction at the magazine and edited reviews by the film critic Pauline Kael.
As a book editor, he helped polish the poetry and prose of Noah Baumbach, Michael Chabon, Billy Collins, Ted Conover, Mavis Gallant, Jonathan Kellerman, Colum McCann, Alice Munro, V.S. Pritchett, Salman Rushdie, Gary Shteyngart, Daniel Silva and Elizabeth Strout.
He also edited “Primary Colors: A Novel of Politics,” the best-selling 1996 roman à clef inspired by Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign. Its author, the columnist Joe Klein, was billed on the cover as “Anonymous” and was unknown even to Mr. Menaker and other Random House executives until after the book was published. (Mr. Menaker took credit for the title.). . . .
His own half-dozen books were mostly critically acclaimed. They include “The Treatment” (1998), which The Times called his “engaging first novel,” about a 32-year-old private-school teacher undergoing psychoanalysis (it was adapted for a film in 2006); “The Old Left and Other Stories” (1987) — Mr. Menaker twice won the O. Henry Award for his short stories — and “My Mistake” (2013), a bittersweet memoir. . . .
Robert Daniel Menaker was born on Sept. 17, 1941, in Manhattan to decidedly mixed lineage. His father, Robert Owen Menaker, who designed, sold and exported furniture to Mexico and South America, was the son of a Jewish immigrant from Russia whose rabbinical ancestry could supposedly be traced to King Solomon and who had been jailed in czarist Russia as a revolutionary. Mr. Menaker’s mother, Mary R. Grace, the chief copy editor at Fortune magazine, was said to be a descendant of William the Conqueror.
A red-diaper baby, Mr. Menaker attended what he described as the “aptronymic” Little Red School House in Greenwich Village in the 1940s. His father was a Communist Party member who, on his travels to Mexico, spied on Leon Trotsky, the Bolshevik revolutionary exiled by Stalin. (Daniel Menaker described his own politics as “anarcho-syndicalist.”)
Daniel was 10 when his first contribution appeared in The New Yorker: a Talk of the Town item about a classmate who had identified Columbus’s fleet as “the Atchison, the Topeka and the Santa Fe” railroads. Mr. Menaker told the arts journal The Brooklyn Rail in 2016: “Miraculously, they recast it a bit and published it. I guess it set me on the road to authorial vanity and perdition.”. . .
He went to Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania, where he majored in philosophy and poetry and was captain of the soccer team. . . .He was taught the guitar by Michael Meeropol, the older son of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who were convicted of conspiring to spy for the Soviet Union and executed.
He graduated in 1963 and earned a master’s in English at Johns Hopkins University.
Mr. Menaker married Ms. Bouton in 1980. A freelance writer at the time, she became an editor at The Times and is the author of books on hearing loss. In addition to her, he is survived by their son, Will, a founder and host of the political podcast Chapo Trap House; and a daughter, Elizabeth Menaker.
Mr. Menaker taught at the private Collegiate School in Manhattan (which provided fodder for “The Treatment”) before he was hired by The New Yorker in 1968 as a fact checker. He was working as a copy editor when, by his account, Mr. Shawn dismissed him as a know-it-all, but not before telling him that he could stay on while taking as long as he needed to find another job. It took 26 years. . . .
With The New Yorker focusing more on nonfiction, Mr. Menaker was eased out after Tina Brown took over as editor in the 1990s. Her husband, Harold Evans, the publisher of Random House, hired him to be a senior literary editor there in 1995. After a brief hiatus as executive editor of HarperCollins, Mr. Menaker returned to Random House as executive editor in chief of the Random House Publishing Group in 2003. He left in 2007.
He was later the host of an online talk show about books called “TitlePage.” Among his other books were “The Worst” (1979, with Charles McGrath), a ranking of objectionable items by category; and “A Good Talk: The Story and Skill of Conversation” (2010), which affirmed his bona fides as a grammarian. (He once praised the lawyer Joseph Welch’s denunciation of Senator Joseph McCarthy — “Have you left no sense of decency?” — because he “ends up with ‘decency’ instead of ‘left.’”). . .
—
Sam Roberts, an obituaries reporter, was previously The Times’s urban affairs correspondent and is the host of “The New York Times Close Up,” a weekly news and interview program on CUNY-TV.
Speak Your Mind