Clay Felker; New York editor defined the New Journalism

Clay Felker defined the form of the city magazine, encouraging writers to address modern life in a bold, descriptive style. (Alen MacWeeney/CORBIS/file 1985)

Clay Felker - the farsighted 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 July 1 at his Manhattan home of throat and mouth cancer. He was 82.

By defining the form of the modern city magazine and by encouraging writers to address modern life in a bold, vividly descriptive style, Mr. 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, Mr. 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 Mr. Felker soon found an innovative formula that would inspire imitators around the world.

He combined in-depth articles on politics, crime, and finance with lighter features on shopping, restaurants, reviews, and listings that made New York, in Mr. Felker's words, "a guide on how to live in this city." The magazine's lively design, created by art director Milton Glaser, reflected Mr. Felker's view of New York, both the city and the magazine, as a bright and varied feast for the mind and the eye.

His complicated personality, which ranged from soothing encouraging to volcanic anger, left few people indifferent.

"He is variously described by associates and acquaintances as autocratic, devious, dishonest, rapacious, egotistical, power mad, paranoid, a bully, and a boor," a 1977 Time magazine article said. "Almost in the same breath, the same people call Felker a genius."

In the early years of New York magazine, Mr. Felker assembled a staff of writers that included Wolfe, Gloria Steinem, Nora Ephron, Richard Reeves, Pete Hamill, Jack Newfield, Aaron Latham, Mimi Sheraton, and Gail Sheehy, who became Mr. Felker's third wife. He exhorted them to write in distinctively personal voices as they explored city's trends, horrors, and delights. An anthology of writing from New York will be published in the fall.

"It was a magazine that helped create the notion of the writer as star," one of Mr. Felker's writers, Ken Auletta, told The Washington Post in 1977.

New York had a tone that seemed to match the heady confusion of the times. Much of the issue of June 8, 1970, was devoted to Wolfe's "Radical Chic," which described a fund-raiser for the Black Panthers held at the apartment of conductor Leonard Bernstein. Wolfe's scathing story, which coined the term "limousine liberals," became a classic of New Journalism. Six years later, in another New York article, Wolfe summed up the entire era when he called it the "Me Decade."

Wolfe called Mr. Felker "the greatest idea man that ever existed" in a 1993 interview with The Washington Post.

"My philosophy is that you have faith in the writer's point of view," Mr. Felker told the Post. "You pick the writers you believe in and give them their freedom. As opposed to most editors who want to mold the writers into what they want, make them a tool of the editors."

As an early champion of women in journalism, Mr. Felker helped Steinem's fledgling magazine, Ms., get off the ground when he included a 40-page preview issue in an edition of New York.

Yet, for all his success in defining an era, Mr. Felker was just as often derided for what could be called his feats of Clay. He once published a nude photo of Viva, an actress associated with Andy Warhol, and critics found some articles to be adolescent or needlessly provocative.

The journalism review More complained that New York magazine was little more than "a weekly diet of superficiality at best and deception at worst, reality distorted for the sake of titillation."

Breslin parted with Mr. Felker in the early 1970s, saying the magazine "caused me to become gagged with perfume and disheartened by character collapse."

As the circulation and reputation of his flagship magazine grew, Mr. Felker sought to expand his journalistic empire in the mid-1970s by buying the Village Voice and by launching New West, a West Coast version of New York.

In 1977, after Mr. Felker was forced out of New York magazine, he became publisher and part-owner of Esquire, where he hoped to revitalize the ailing men's journal. Less than two years later, the magazine was sold out from under him, and he was adrift once more.

Mr. Felker continued to have modest triumphs as editor of Adweek magazine and the business-oriented Manhattan Inc. in the 1980s, but both efforts proved short-lived. He was still remembered as the editor who created - and lost - New York.

Clay Schuette Felker was born Oct. 25, 1925, in St. Louis, where his father was managing editor of the Sporting News. Mr. Felker printed his first newspaper, the Greeley Street News, when he was 8 and sold it in his hometown of Webster Groves, Mo.

His earlier marriages to Leslie Blatt Felker and actress Pamela Tiffin ended in divorce. In addition to his third wife, survivors include Sheehy's daughter, Mohm Phat Sheehy of Cambridge; a stepdaughter, Maura Sheehy Moss, of Brooklyn, N.Y.; a sister; and three grandchildren.