RIP: Barbara Epstein, co-inventor of world's best litmag, kicks bucket, shuffles off mortal coil, turns to dust, and I want to cry

I fucking love The NY Review of Books. I heard Barbara Epstein speak once, and she was very nice: modest, fun, sweet. Amazing magazine she hatched and nursed all these years. A template for the modern intellectual life. If music is the condition all art aspires to, the NY Review of Books is the condition all literary magazines should aspire to, down to the format and the grade of paper and the wonderful drawings. It's always readable and bereft of jargon, which is more than you can say for most. Plus it's the only magazine I know that J.M. Coetzee writes for. 77 is too young for people like Ms. Epstein to die.

Barbara Epstein, Editor and Literary Arbiter, Dies at 77 -- by CHARLES McGRATH

Barbara Epstein, a founder and co-editor of The New York Review of Books and a figure at the center of New York literary life for decades, died yesterday in the apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan in which she had lived for more than 50 years. She was 77.

The cause was lung cancer, her son, Jacob, said. He added that his mother, whose cancer was diagnosed in September 2005, was in her office as recently as two and a half weeks ago.

For much of her career, Ms. Epstein was famous for being part of a tandem. During the 1950's and 60's, she and her husband at the time, Jason, were the first couple of publishing, powerful book editors who knew everyone and gave the kind of high-octane dinner parties that warranted mention in Edmund Wilson's journals.

With Robert Silvers, her co-editor at The New York Review, she had an office partnership that endured even longer than her marriage, which ended in divorce in 1980.

"Barbara was one of the most influential editors of our time," the writer Janet Malcolm said. "But she had none of the qualities — aggressiveness, ruthlessness, egotism — that are commonly associated with powerful editors. Barbara's uncommon modesty, gentleness and charm were the source of a certain mysteriousness. They were also, of course, entirely of a piece with the magazine she and Bob Silvers put out."

Ms. Epstein was born Barbara Zimmerman, the younger of two sisters, in Boston in 1928. Her father sold textiles and her mother was a homemaker. She attended Girls Latin School and graduated in 1949 from Radcliffe.

She began her editorial career as an assistant at Doubleday, then quickly rose to prominence there as the editor of Anne Frank's "Diary of a Young Girl," among other books. She went on to work at Dutton, McGraw-Hill and The Partisan Review. In 1954 she married Mr. Epstein. Their children, Jacob, of Los Angeles, and Helen, of Brooklyn, survive her, as do three grandchildren.

It was at the Epsteins' dinner table, during the winter of 1962, that the idea for The New York Review of Books was hatched. New York's daily newspapers were on strike, and the absence of The New York Times Book Review had stranded publishers with no place to advertise their books and authors with no place for their work to be written about. To fill the vacuum, Mr. and Mrs. Epstein, together with Robert Lowell and his wife, Elizabeth Hardwick, who were guests that evening, decided to put out a book review of their own. "Jason was, like, 'Kids, let's put on a show,' " Ms. Epstein recalled.

The strike ended in February, but The Review, which had by then come out twice, was so successful that Ms. Epstein and Mr. Silvers, who had been recruited as co-editor, decided to keep it going. It became one of the most influential and admired journals of its kind, attracting a high-powered roster of writers. The books reviewed and those who reviewed them were all carefully hand picked, causing many to view the magazine as a kind of private club.

Ms. Epstein and Mr. Silvers made an unusual literary tag team. He is large and formidable. She was small, friendly and enthusiastic. They informally divided the literary turf between them. Mr. Silvers claimed history, politics, science and art history; Ms. Epstein looked after the arts and more literary books. But philosophically they saw eye to eye.

"We were such close partners in the way of sharing every commission, every manuscript, every decision," Mr. Silvers said yesterday. Ms. Epstein, he said, read every manuscript that made it into The Review.

The poet James Fenton said: "The system was always that whichever was actually editing you, the other was always checking in. Nothing was done by one without the participation of the other."

Ms. Epstein was famous for putting articles though multiple revisions if necessary, sending out what were known as the A, B, C and sometimes the D and E proofs. "She was the fiercest editor," the writer Diane Johnson , a close friend, recalled. "Very much the perfectionist, but in a very sympathetic way."

And she was arguably the more fun-loving of The New York Review's ruling pair, reliably turning up at book parties, no matter how obscure, except on evenings when she was giving her own. Her companion of many years after her divorce was the columnist Murray Kempton, who died in 1997.

"She loved Champagne," the writer Nora Ephron recalled, "and she herself had this quality that was so fizzy and festive, with such an appetite for trivia and gossip, that you completely forgot she was the editor of The New York Review."