Ben Sonnenberg; founded literary journal

The cause was complications of multiple sclerosis, his daughter Emma Snowdon-Jones said.

Mr. Sonnenberg funneled the proceeds from the sale of his father’s five-story town house into Grand Street, a journal conceived in the spirit of high-minded but nonacademic magazines like The Dial and Horizon. He edited and published it for nine years, working out of the dining room of his apartment on Riverside Drive, until health problems forced him to sell the magazine in 1990. It ceased publication in 2004.

“I thought a magazine would be a good way to give money to individuals whose writing I liked,’’ he told Newsday in 1989. “I wanted it to be like a European magazine, a space where you could expect pleasure and intellectual talk of both politics and art, of sex as well as money.’’ A dandy, boulevardier, and self-educated litterateur, Mr. Sonnenberg consulted only his own taste, backing it with substantial paychecks to his writers, some well known and others not. Grand Street was the first to publish the short stories of Susan Minot, for example, whom Mr. Sonnenberg hired to work at the magazine.

“It was his work of art, in a way,’’ Minot said Friday. “It had an Old World feeling about it. It was not going to be sullied with anything that was not worthwhile.’’

The first issue of Grand Street — named after the street on the Lower East Side of New York where Mr. Sonnenberg’s parents grew up — featured excerpts from the novelist Glenway Wescott’s Paris journals, as well as articles, stories, and poems by Ted Hughes, Alice Munro, James Salter, John Hollander, Northrop Frye, and W.S. Merwin.

Later issues included political reporting by Amy Wilentz and Christopher Hitchens offbeat matchups of writer and subject that Mr. Sonnenberg loved to instigate. For example, he commissioned the jazz critic Gary Giddins to profile Jack Benny. The Washington Post, surveying the winter 1985 issue, described the magazine as “Hellenic, leftish, mandarin, impeccable.’’

“Of all those characteristics, the one I find hardest to accept is ‘impeccable,’ ’’ Mr. Sonnenberg told the Globe in 1990.

Benjamin Sonnenberg Jr. was born in Manhattan on Dec. 30, 1936. His father was one of the most powerful publicists in the United States, representing corporate clients like Lever Brothers and Lipton Tea and personal clients like Samuel Goldwyn, David O. Selznick, and William S. Paley.

In “Lost Property: Memoirs and Confessions of a Bad Boy,’’ Mr. Sonnenberg described a childhood — surrounded by 18th-century English furniture and a household staff of six — where celebrities from the worlds of business, film, theater, and publishing mingled at constant dinner parties.

It was not a happy childhood. He made himself unwelcome at a series of private schools. Precocious, pretentious, and incorrigible, he took Oscar Wilde as his role model and doted on the writings of the Marquis de Sade.

“At 7 years old, my favorite form of expression was the epigram,’’ he wrote in “Lost Property.’’ At 13, inspired by Casanova, he began writing his memoirs. He did not manage to finish high school.

He wrote three plays, one of which, “Jane Street,’’ ran for four nights in an off-off-Broadway production.

In his mid-30s, Mr. Sonnenberg began experiencing the symptoms of multiple sclerosis. He bought a stylish cane, but soon needed two.

Eventually he was paralyzed from the neck down.

Grand Street gave Mr. Sonnenberg a position of cultural influence, although its circulation never exceeded 5,000.