Theodore Solotaroff, 80; his New American Review showcased writers
NEW YORK - 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 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.
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 divorce, and she died in 1994. His marriages to Shirley Fingerhood and Ghislaine Boulanger, both of New York, ended in divorce.
In addition to his sons Paul of Brooklyn and Ivan of New Town, Pa., both from his first marriage, he leaves his sons Jason of Montclair, N.J., from his marriage to Fingerhood, and Isaac of Brooklyn, from his marriage to Boulanger; his wife, Virginia 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.
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 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
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 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. 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."
