NEW YORK — Clay Felker, 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 Monday 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, 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.
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.
In the early years, 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 Felker’s third wife.
He exhorted them to write in distinctively personal voices as they explored the city’s trends, horrors and delights. An anthology of writing from New York will be published in the fall.
