Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} The Best American Magazine Writing 2000 by Clay Felker The Best American Magazine Writing 2000 by Clay Felker. Completing the CAPTCHA proves you are a human and gives you temporary access to the web property. What can I do to prevent this in the future? If you are on a personal connection, like at home, you can run an anti-virus scan on your device to make sure it is not infected with malware. If you are at an office or shared network, you can ask the network administrator to run a scan across the network looking for misconfigured or infected devices. Another way to prevent getting this page in the future is to use Privacy Pass. You may need to download version 2.0 now from the Chrome Web Store. Cloudflare Ray ID: 661d0106bb821f51 • Your IP : 116.202.236.252 • Performance & security by Cloudflare. Clay Felker’s National Monument. In the late 1960s and early ’70s, cultural and economic vitality were oozing, often gushing, away from American cities into suburbia. A 1967 Time cover story, “Our Embattled Cities,” featured Daniel Patrick Moynihan, calling him an “urbanologist,” and extending the title to other thoughtful academics and city planners, including Edward J. Logue, whose State Urban Development Corporation would build Roosevelt Island. In that time, another innovative “urbanologist” emerged from the galley proofs, green eyeshades, and ink-stained disrepute of American journalism. Just as Pat Moynihan became the best friend the American city ever had in the U.S. Senate, Clay Schuette Felker restored and enriched urban values in the largest, liveliest, gaudiest and most embattled American metropolis. When Felker died on July 1, at 82, eulogists noted his influence on magazine journalism. New York, which he founded in 1968, spawned more imitators than any magazine in the 20th century. Proliferating “city magazines” thought The Passionate Shopper and The Underground Gourmet were shortcuts to sophistication. They borrowed the graphics-and-demographics veneer while missing the essence of Clay Felker: old-fashioned straight reporting, abundantly present in New York Stories: Landmark Writing From Four Decades of New York Magazine . IN 1913, LOUIS BRANDEIS described journalism’s mission: “Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants; electric light the most efficient policeman.” From Pete Hamill to Michael Daly, from Gael Greene to Joe Klein, from Stephen Sondheim to Kurt Andersen, New York’s writers covered and uncovered the city and its place in the world. In national politics, New York assigned the right writer to each subject: on Richard Nixon, David Halberstam on Spiro Agnew, Dick Reeves on Gerald Ford, and Garry Wills on George Wallace. This vintage stuff still illuminates, its clear-eyed tradition continuing in Jennifer Senior’s concise take on Barack Obama’s generational appeal: “There’s something to be said for a politician who didn’t come of age wearing sideburns and listening to Simon and Garfunkel.” The tradition descends from Horace Greeley and James Gordon Bennett and their . In the 1960s, the Trib was the Camelot of city rooms, a romantic vision of a reporter’s paper. It was an editor’s paper, too. and Dick Wald led an all-star troupe, two of whom would adorn the new Sunday supplement, New York : , Balzac of the outer boroughs, and , the Evelyn Waugh-spish scourge of haute . They were the most talented reporters of their time. In addition to their daily duties, they were staff writers for Clay Felker’s New York. Both, along with Pete Hamill, have since found success writing novels. “Breslin—that cop! That precinct station genius!,” Philip Roth’s Portnoy complained. Louder gripes came from The New Yorker in 1965 when Wolfe called it, among more lethal things, “the most successful suburban women’s magazine in the country.” Unlike today’s New Yorker , the magazine of Harold Ross had indeed drifted into a suburban sensibility. Although it first printed Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring , a Talk of the Town comment bemoaned the banning of autumn bonfires in suburbia. New York consistently challenged institutions; long after Felker left, his successors honored his no-sacred-cows imperative. In 1995, Saturday Night Live had become notoriously unfunny. For weeks, Chris Smith inhaled the toxic fumes of SNL’s “deep spiritual funk,” documenting rampant smugness and arrogance. “Watching the current incarnation of the show,” he wrote, “is like watching late-period Elvis—embarrassing and poignant.” CLAY FELKER, A SON of St. Louis, was a lifelong baseball fan. How more urban a moment could there be than the 1951 playoff game showdown between Ralph Branca and Bobby Thomson? In the radio booth at the Polo Grounds, helping with statistics, sat Felker, a Duke undergraduate. Years later, I asked him how many times broadcaster Russ Hodges shouted, “The Giants win the pennant! The Giants win the pennant!” Clay replied, “Eleven.” I freelanced for him from Washington in the Watergate era, writing about the rise of Hugh Carey in Congress; a survival guide to Albany; a profile of Tip O’Neill. Clay accepted or rejected ideas quickly because, as Tom Wolfe notes in this volume’s forward, “he was his own best reporter.” He thought like one, too. He was clear about when and what he wanted; the line-by-line editing of Shelly Zalaznick was crisp; payment was appropriate and prompt. “Light in the Frightening Corners” was another Time headline in 1967. Felker’s curiosity, as New York Stories documents, shone everywhere. The Mafia? “Wiseguy” offers this arresting lead by Nick Pileggi: “On Tuesday, May 22, 1980, a man named Henry Hill did what seemed to him the only sensible thing to do: He decided to cease to exist.” The light shone in less frightening places in George Plimpton’s 1983 guide through “the Siberian reaches” of Elaine’s back room with the then-unpublished Jerry Spinelli. Or the hilariously Stygian gloom of Jimmy Breslin’s black-Irish reverie in 1969, when Norman Mailer ran for mayor and Breslin ran for city council president. Confessing that politics “got to be a drug,” Breslin soon asks himself, “‘Why is Mailer on the top of the ticket?’ … He has a Harvard diploma. On ability, I should be mayor.” Women writers, grudgingly accepted elsewhere, flourished at New York, as the roster in this volume suggests. Ms. magazine made its debut as an insert in New York . The editors’ omission of “The Housewife’s Moment of Truth” by Jane O’Reilly deprives readers of a major feminist manifesto. This volume may help historians of American cities understand Clay Felker and his era. His imitators have obscured his originality and his genius, just as banal and brutal glass boxes have obscured Mies van der Rohe’s Seagram Building. Nora Ephron summed it up best: “There are many reasons why the quality of life in New York is so much better than it was in 1968, but one of the main ones is Clay.” Felker Clay Ed. Soft cover. Condition: Near Fine. 1st Edition. Trade paperback. First printing. Remainder else fine. Esquire Fortnightly, January 30, 1979 (Vol. 91, No. 2) Felker, Clay S. (ed.) Published by Esquire Magazine, Inc., New York, 1979. Used - Softcover Condition: Very Good. Stapled Paperback. Condition: Very Good. No Jacket. 88 pp. The rear cover is creased at the upper fore-corner. The binding is tight and the text is clean. Contains the first publication of F. Scott Fitzgerald's last unpublished short story "On Your Own.". The Power Game. Felker, Clay (Ed.) Published by Simon and Schuster, New York, U.S.A., 1969. Used - Softcover Condition: Very Good. Paper Back. Condition: Very Good. 253 pages. The book is a bit worn and the dust jacket is rubbed. Books listed here are not stored at the shop. Please contact us if you want to pick up a book from Newtown. Size: Size E: 8"-9" Tall (203-228mm). Tell us what you're looking for and once a match is found, we'll inform you by e-mail. Can't remember the title or the author of a book? Our BookSleuth is specially designed for you. Clay Felker, Magazine Pioneer, Dies at 82. Clay Felker, a visionary editor who was widely credited with inventing the formula for the modern magazine, giving it energetic expression in a glossy weekly named for and devoted to the boisterous city that fascinated him ​ New York ​ died today at his home in Manhattan. He was 82. The death was announced by New York magazine on its Web site and confirmed by his wife, the writer . He had been battling cancer of the throat and mouth. Mr. Felker edited a number of publications besides New York magazine. There were stints at Esquire, , Adweek, Manhattan, inc. and others. He created an opposite-coast counterpart to New York and called it New West. But it was at New York that he left his biggest imprint on American journalism. He founded it as a Sunday supplement to The New York Herald Tribune in 1964. Four years later, after the newspaper closed, he and the graphic designer Milton Glaser reintroduced New York as a glossy stand-alone magazine. New York’s mission was to compete for consumer attention at a time when television threatened to overwhelm print publications. To do that, Mr. Felker came up with a distinctive format: a combination of long narrative articles and short witty ones on consumer services. He embraced the of the late ’60s ​ the use of novelistic techniques to give reporting new layers of emotional depth. And he adopted a tone that was unapologetically elitist, indefatigably trendy and proudly provincial ​ in a sophisticated Manhattan-centric sort of way. The headlines were bold, the graphics even bolder. The look and attitude captured the attention of the city and influenced editors and designers for years to come. Dozens of city magazines modeling themselves after New York sprang up around the country. Mr. Felker’s magazine was hip and ardent, civically minded and skeptical. It was preoccupied with the foibles of the rich and powerful, the fecklessness of government, and the hijinks of wiseguys. But it never lost sight of the complicated business and cultural life of the city. Articles were often gossipy, even vicious, and some took liberties with sourcing and journalistic techniques. Tom Wolfe, Jimmy Breslin, Gloria Steinem and others in Mr. Felker’s stable of star writers helped give the magazine national prominence. Meanwhile, what he called his “secret weapon,” its service coverage ​ on where to eat, shop, drink and live ​ kept many readers coming back. Mr. Felker eventually lost New York to in a bitter takeover battle in 1977. But his influence can still be felt in the current magazine, from its in-crowd tone to its ubiquitous infographics and inventive typography tailored to each article. “Clay was obsessed with power, and he invented a magazine in the image of that obsession,” said Adam Moss, New York’s current editor. “His New York took you into backrooms and boardrooms and reported on the secret machinations of the city’s players.” His roster of writers also included Ken Auletta, Julie Baumgold, Steven Brill, Elizabeth Crow, Gael Greene, Nicholas Pileggi, Richard Reeves, Dick Schaap, Mimi Sheraton and John Simon. Many of them called him the best editor in the country, although some said he was autocratic and took joy in hectoring and humiliating them. “His voice, his personality, his superhuman animation were horrifying, of course, but they were also the best part of working with him,” Ms. Crow, who later became editor of Mademoiselle and died in 2005, wrote in 1975. “Clay’s booming tenor voice was simply the most noticeable manifestation of the 100-per-cent in-your-face and in-your-ears and in-your-brain atmosphere he created wherever he went.” The supercharged atmosphere of New York was a long way from Webster Groves, Mo., where Clay Schuette Felker, born on Oct. 2, 1925, grew up. (His German immigrant forebears had changed their name from Von Fredrikstein to Volker and later anglicized it as Felker.) His father, Carl, was the managing editor of The Sporting News; his mother, Cora Tyree Felker, had been women’s editor of The St. Louis Post-Dispatch before having children. After enrolling at , Clay left college for a three-year hitch in the Navy before returning to graduate in 1951. At Duke, he edited the undergraduate newspaper and married Leslie Aldridge, another undergraduate. The marriage ended in divorce, and so did his second marriage, to Pamela Tiffin, an actress. In 1984 he married Ms. Sheehy, who first wrote for him at The New York Herald Tribune and who later became widely known as the author of “Passages” and other books. After college, Mr. Felker was a reporter for Life magazine for six years and worked on the development of Sports Illustrated. He later became features editor of Esquire but quit when his rival, , got the top job. In 1963, he joined The Herald Tribune and became founding editor of the supplement New York. When he and Mr. Glaser rolled out the revamped, stand-alone version in 1968, the reviews were mixed. “Though occasional critics find New York excessively slick and too often frivolous, the magazine undeniably generates excitement ​ an excitement that is winning readers not just in Manhattan but in urban centers across the country,” Newsweek said in 1970. Others were less impressed. “Boutique journalism,” Mr. Breslin called it when he quit the magazine in 1971, fed up, he said, with its dilettante attitude. Ms. Steinem was bothered by the magazine’s East Side orientation. “When the city is falling apart, we are writing about renovating brownstones,” she said. But Ms. Steinem stayed on as a staff writer and was rewarded when Mr. Felker helped her and others start the feminist magazine called Ms. He inserted a 40-page preview of Ms. in New York’s issue of Dec. 20, 1971, and helped finance the first issue. Many of Mr. Felker’s writers followed him from The Herald Tribune. One, Mr. Wolfe, the magazine’s most visible stylist, shared many of Mr. Felker’s views and thrived on the freedom his boss gave him to write satiric, sometimes savage articles about what became known as the New Society. “Together they attacked what each regarded as the greatest untold and uncovered story of the age ​ the vanities, extravagances, pretensions and artifice of America two decades after World War II, the wealthiest society the world had ever known,” Richard Kluger wrote in his book “The Paper: The Life and Death of The New York Herald Tribune” (Knopf, 1986). Probably no article better captured this strain of social-history journalism than one whose title created an American idiom: “Radical Chic.” With unsparing detail and barely concealed mockery, Mr. Wolfe, exhausting 20,000 words, described a fund-raising party given by Leonard Bernstein in his glamorous Manhattan apartment attended by rich liberals and Black Panthers, who were the recipients of the evening’s charitable event. The article, appearing in June 1970, outraged both the liberals and the Panthers, but the issue was a sell-out. Mr. Felker’s New York magazine became a prime practitioner of the New Journalism, again to mixed reactions. The form’s admirers believed it represented events more truthfully than traditional objective reporting could. Conventional journalism, they said, reported what people said; the New Journalists tried to present what people really felt and thought. “Nonsense,” its critics countered. They considered New Journalism fiction masquerading as reportage and its practitioners as manipulators of reader responses. One article, about a prostitute and her pimp, titled “Redpants and Sugarman,” drew heavy criticism when it was later revealed that Redpants was a composite figure created from all the prostitutes that the writer, Ms. Sheehy, had interviewed. Mr. Felker later said he had erred in not letting readers know the truth about Redpants. He said that Ms. Sheehy had originally explained her method in the second paragraph but that he had removed it. “I felt it slowed the story down,” he said in an interview with in 1995. “But we learned a lesson,” he said. “Composite is never used any more.” Few readers flipping through its pages would have mistaken New York as a magazine for the five boroughs. That was never the idea. “Everybody who worked on New York lived in Manhattan,” Mr. Felker told The Times. “So it was essentially a Manhattan magazine. And I believe that print ​ now that broadcast has become the dominant mass media ​ has to be aimed at educated, affluent people.” He added: “I’ve been criticized for being elitist, but that’s who, broadly speaking, consumes print. That was our set of values ​ our attitude ​ to understand how to make life more interesting, to explain New York life.” In its first year as an independent publication, with an initial circulation of 50,000, New York lost $1.7 million. In the fall of 1969, still in the red, New York went public, offering 20 percent of its stock at $10 a share. The next year, with circulation at 240,000, the magazine finally broke even, and Mr. Felker became publisher as well as editor. Demanding as his job at New York was, he was hungry for more. In 1974 New York acquired The Village Voice, the liberal New York weekly. (That same year he moved New York into new quarters on Second Avenue, complete with gym, staff dining room and full-time chef; today, the magazine, published by New York Media Holdings L.L.C., has headquarters in SoHo.) In 1976 Mr. Felker started a clone of New York for the California market, calling the magazine New West. By the end of that year, Rupert Murdoch, the Australian press baron who had just paid $30 million to add The New York Post to his chain of newspapers in Australia, Britain and the , made an offer to buy New York. It set off several weeks of high drama, complete with front-page coverage in the New York press. Mr. Felker refused the Murdoch offer. Then, worried he might lose his magazine, he asked his old friend Katharine Graham, the publisher of The Washington Post, to back him in a bid to keep the company. Mrs. Graham offered to buy out Carter Burden, the principal stockholder, who held 24 percent of the stock. Mr. Burden, who had once been the subject of an unflattering profile in Mr. Felker’s magazine, turned her down. The next day, Mr. Murdoch flew to Sun Valley, Idaho, where Mr. Burden was skiing, and made a deal. Mr. Felker immediately obtained a temporary restraining order to block the sale. Meanwhile, tales of Mr. Murdoch’s lurid tabloid journalism were causing such agitation among New York staff members that they walked off the job an hour before the magazine’s closing deadline, saying they would never work for Mr. Murdoch. Concerned that the walkout would hurt his efforts to block the sale, Mr. Felker frantically tried to find his writers and get them back to work. After looking through bars on the East Side, he finally found them at a McDonald’s. But by then it was too late to meet the deadline. And suddenly it was over: Mr. Felker was out. An agreement was signed before dawn on Jan. 7, 1977. Mr. Murdoch gained control of the company and agreed to buy Mr. Felker’s shares for $1.4 million. Mr. Felker was never able to recreate the brio of New York. In 1978 he joined with Associated Newspapers to buy Esquire and was its editor and publisher until 1981. He became a producer at 20th Century Fox; the editor of Daily News Tonight, an afternoon edition of The Daily News in New York; the editor of Manhattan, inc., a magazine for Wall Streeters; and editor of various smaller publications. In addition to Ms. Sheehy, Mr. Felker is survived by a sister, Charlotte Gallagher; a daughter, Mohm Sheehy, of Cambridge, a stepdaughter, Maura Sheehy Moss, of Brooklyn, and three step-grandchildren. Although repeated surgery to address his cancer impinged on his ability to speak in his later years, Mr. Felker continued as a consultant to magazines. In 1994 he became a lecturer at the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley. The next year the school established the Clay Felker Magazine Center. The West Coast became his second home, but nothing ever quite equaled those high-living and hard-working days when was his muse and New York magazine his darling. “I know why Clay is such a good editor,” said his friend Muriel Resnick, the novelist and playwright. “He works until eight o’clock. He goes somewhere every night. He’s out with people, he talks to people, he listens to people. And he doesn’t drink.” Clay Felker, Magazine Pioneer, Dies at 82. Clay Felker, a visionary editor who was widely credited with inventing the formula for the modern magazine, giving it energetic expression in a glossy weekly named for and devoted to the boisterous city that fascinated him ​ New York ​ died on Tuesday at his home in Manhattan. He was 82. His death was of natural causes, said his wife, the author Gail Sheehy. He had throat cancer in his later years. Mr. Felker edited a number of publications besides New York magazine. There were stints at Esquire, The Village Voice, Adweek and others. He also created an opposite-coast counterpart to New York and called it New West. But it was at New York that he left his biggest imprint on American journalism. He had edited the magazine when it was a Sunday supplement to The New York Herald Tribune founded in 1964. Four years later, after the newspaper had closed, Mr. Felker and the graphic designer Milton Glaser reintroduced New York as a glossy, stand-alone magazine. New York’s mission was to compete for consumer attention at a time when television threatened to overwhelm print publications. To do that, Mr. Felker came up with a distinctive format: a combination of long narrative articles and short, witty ones on consumer services. He embraced the New Journalism of the late ’60s: the use of novelistic techniques to give reporting new layers of emotional depth. And he adopted a tone that was unapologetically elitist, indefatigably trendy and proudly provincial, in a sophisticated, Manhattan-centric sort of way. The headlines were bold, the graphics even bolder. The look and attitude captured the attention of the city and influenced editors and designers for years to come. Dozens of city magazines modeling themselves after New York sprang up around the country. Mr. Felker’s magazine was hip and ardent, civic-minded and skeptical. It was preoccupied with the foibles of the rich and powerful, the fecklessness of government and the high jinks of wiseguys. But it never lost sight of the complicated business and cultural life of the city. Articles were often gossipy, even vicious, and some took liberties with sources and journalistic techniques. A National Profile. Tom Wolfe, Jimmy Breslin, Gloria Steinem and others in Mr. Felker’s stable of star writers helped give the magazine national prominence. Meanwhile, what he called its “secret weapon,” its service coverage ​ on where to eat, shop, drink and live ​ kept many readers coming back. Mr. Felker eventually lost New York magazine to Rupert Murdoch in a bitter takeover battle in 1977. But his influence can still be felt in the current magazine, from its in-crowd tone to its ubiquitous infographics and inventive typography tailored to each article. “American journalism would not be what it is today without Clay Felker,” Adam Moss, New York’s current editor, said in a statement yesterday. Mr. Felker, he once said, “was obsessed with power, and he invented a magazine in the image of that obsession,” one that “reported on the secret machinations of the city’s players.” Mr. Felker’s roster of writers also included Ken Auletta, Julie Baumgold, Steven Brill, Elizabeth Crow, Gael Greene, Nicholas Pileggi, Richard Reeves, Dick Schaap, Mimi Sheraton and John Simon. Many of them called him the best editor in the country, although some said he was autocratic and took joy in hectoring and humiliating them. “His voice, his personality, his superhuman animation were horrifying, of course, but they were also the best part of working with him,” Ms. Crow, who later became editor of Mademoiselle and who died in 2005, wrote in 1975. “Clay’s booming tenor voice was simply the most noticeable manifestation of the 100 percent in-your-face and in-your-ears and in-your-brain atmosphere he created wherever he went.” The supercharged atmosphere of New York was a long way from Webster Groves, Mo., where Clay Schuette Felker, born on Oct. 2, 1925, grew up. (His German immigrant forebears had changed their name from von Fredrikstein to Volker and later anglicized it as Felker.) Journalism ran in his family. His father, Carl, was the managing editor of The Sporting News; his mother, Cora Tyree Felker, had been women’s editor of The St. Louis Post-Dispatch before having children. After enrolling at Duke University, Mr. Felker left college for a three-year hitch in the Navy before returning to graduate in 1951. At Duke he edited the undergraduate newspaper and married Leslie Aldridge, another undergraduate. The marriage ended in divorce, as did his second marriage, to Pamela Tiffin, an actress. In 1984 he married Gail Sheehy, who first wrote for him at The Herald Tribune and who later became widely known as the author of “Passages” and other books. After college, Mr. Felker was a reporter for Life magazine for six years and worked on the development of Sports Illustrated. He later became features editor of Esquire but quit when his rival, Harold Hayes, got the top job. In 1963 he joined The Herald Tribune and became founding editor of the supplement called New York. A Debut Hits the Stands. When he and Mr. Glaser rolled out the revamped, stand-alone version in 1968, the reviews were mixed. “Though occasional critics find New York excessively slick and too often frivolous, the magazine undeniably generates excitement ​ an excitement that is winning readers not just in Manhattan but in urban centers across the country,” Newsweek said in 1970. Others were less impressed. “Boutique journalism,” Mr. Breslin called it when he quit the magazine in 1971, fed up, he said, with its dilettante attitude. Ms. Steinem was bothered by the magazine’s East Side orientation. “When the city is falling apart, we are writing about renovating brownstones,” she said. But Ms. Steinem stayed on as a staff writer and was rewarded when Mr. Felker helped her and others start the feminist magazine called Ms. He inserted a 40-page preview of Ms. in New York’s issue of Dec. 20, 1971, and helped finance the first issue. Many of Mr. Felker’s writers followed him from The Herald Tribune. One, Mr. Wolfe, the magazine’s most visible stylist, shared many of Mr. Felker’s views and thrived on the freedom his boss gave him to write satiric, sometimes savage articles about what became known as the New Society. “Together they attacked what each regarded as the greatest untold and uncovered story of the age ​ the vanities, extravagances, pretensions and artifice of America two decades after World War II, the wealthiest society the world had ever known,” Richard Kluger wrote in his book “The Paper: The Life and Death of The New York Herald Tribune” (Alfred A. Knopf, 1986). Probably no article better captured this strain of social-history journalism than one whose title created an American idiom: “Radical Chic.” With unsparing detail and barely concealed mockery, Mr. Wolfe, exhausting 20,000 words, described a fund-raising party given by Leonard Bernstein in his glamorous Manhattan apartment, attended by rich liberals and Black Panthers, the recipients of the evening’s charitable proceeds. The article, appearing in June 1970, outraged both the liberals and the Panthers, but the issue sold out. Mr. Felker’s New York magazine became a prime practitioner of the New Journalism, again to mixed reactions. The form’s admirers believed it represented events more truthfully than traditional objective reporting could. Conventional journalism, they said, reported what people said; the New Journalists tried to present what people really felt and thought. “Nonsense,” its critics countered. They considered New Journalism fiction masquerading as reportage, and its practitioners as manipulators of reader responses. One article, about a prostitute and her pimp, titled “Redpants and Sugarman,” drew heavy criticism when it was later revealed that Redpants was a composite figure created from all the prostitutes that the writer, Ms. Sheehy, had interviewed. Mr. Felker later said he had erred in not letting readers know the truth about Redpants. He said that Ms. Sheehy had originally explained her method in the second paragraph but that he had removed it. “I felt it slowed the story down,” he said in an interview with The New York Times in 1995. “But we learned a lesson,” he said. “Composite is never used any more. " One-Borough Town. Few readers flipping through its pages would have mistaken New York as a magazine for the five boroughs. That was never the idea. “Everybody who worked on New York lived in Manhattan,” Mr. Felker told The Times. “So it was essentially a Manhattan magazine. And I believe that print ​ now that broadcast has become the dominant mass media ​ has to be aimed at educated, affluent people.” He added: “I’ve been criticized for being elitist, but that’s who, broadly speaking, consumes print. That was our set of values ​ our attitude ​ to understand how to make life more interesting, to explain New York life.” In its first year as an independent publication, with an initial circulation of 50,000, New York lost $1.7 million. In the fall of 1969, still in the red, New York went public, offering 20 percent of its stock at $10 a share. The next year, with circulation at 240,000, the magazine finally broke even, and Mr. Felker became publisher as well as editor. Demanding as his job at New York was, he was hungry for more. In 1974 New York acquired The Village Voice, the liberal New York weekly. (That same year he moved New York into new quarters on Second Avenue, complete with gym, staff dining room and full-time chef; today, the magazine, published by New York Media Holdings LLC, has headquarters on Varick Street in SoHo.) In 1976 Mr. Felker started a clone of New York for the California market, calling the magazine New West. A Takeover Drama. By the end of that year, Mr. Murdoch, the Australian press baron who had just paid $30 million to add The New York Post to his chain of newspapers in Australia, Britain and the United States, made an offer to buy New York magazine. It set off several weeks of high drama, complete with front-page coverage in the New York press. Mr. Felker refused the Murdoch offer. Then, worried he might lose his magazine, he asked his old friend Katharine Graham, the publisher of The Washington Post, to back him in a bid to keep the company. Mrs. Graham offered to buy out Carter Burden, the principal stockholder, who held 24 percent of the stock. Mr. Burden, who had once been the subject of an unflattering profile in Mr. Felker’s magazine, turned her down. The next day Mr. Murdoch flew to Sun Valley, Idaho, where Mr. Burden was skiing, and made a deal. Mr. Felker immediately obtained a temporary restraining order to block the sale. Meanwhile, tales of Mr. Murdoch’s lurid tabloid journalism were causing such agitation among New York staff members that they walked off the job an hour before the magazine’s closing deadline, saying they would never work for Mr. Murdoch. Concerned that the walkout would hurt his efforts to block the sale, Mr. Felker frantically tried to find his writers and get them back to work. After looking through bars on the East Side, he finally found them at a restaurant. But by then it was too late to meet the deadline. And suddenly it was over: Mr. Felker was out. An agreement was signed before dawn on Jan. 7, 1977. Mr. Murdoch gained control of the company and agreed to buy Mr. Felker’s shares for $1.4 million. Mr. Felker was never able to recreate the brio of New York. In 1977 he joined with Associated Newspapers to buy Esquire and was its editor, chief executive and, beginning in 1979, publisher. He became a producer at 20th Century Fox; the editor of Daily News Tonight, an afternoon edition of The Daily News in New York; the editor of Manhattan, inc., a magazine for Wall Streeters; and editor of various smaller publications. In addition to Ms. Sheehy, Mr. Felker is survived by a sister, Charlotte Gallagher; a daughter, Mohm Sheehy of Cambridge, Mass.; a stepdaughter, Maura Sheehy of Brooklyn; and three stepgrandchildren. Although repeated surgery to address his throat cancer impinged on his ability to speak in his later years, Mr. Felker continued as a consultant to magazines. In 1994 he became a lecturer at the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley. The next year the school established the Clay Felker Magazine Center. The West Coast became his second home. And while he loved teaching, nothing ever quite equaled those high-living and hard-working days when New York City was his muse and New York magazine his darling. “I know why Clay is such a good editor,” said his friend the novelist and playwright Muriel Resnick. “He works until 8 o’clock. He goes somewhere every night. He’s out with people, he talks to people, he listens to people, and he doesn’t drink.”