Robert B. Silvers, 1929–2017

Robert B. Silvers, founding editor of The New York Review, died on March 20, 2017, after a short illness. Reminiscences by some of the Review’s writers appear on the NYR Daily this week, and our May 11 issue will include a special supplement in his memory. [Remembering Bob Silvers]( “The first thing I thought I knew about Bob Silvers, when I came to work at The New York Review nearly thirty-seven years ago, was that he did not sleep.” — Luc Sante “He never lost that student’s sense of joy, that curiosity, that overflowing delight in existence.” — Ingrid D. Rowland “He had an unerring nose for what was wrong or lacking in a piece, and he was always gracious in pointing it out.” — Paul Wilson “Chaos and discipline, creativity and rigor, irreverence and seriousness… That’s the real art of editing that Bob perfected: to unscramble the inchoate, wild ideas in the entropic washing machine of writers’ brains.” — Helen Epstein “The New York Review was my graduate school, its back issues my syllabus, and Bob my dean, tutor, and dissertation advisor in one.” — Nathaniel Rich “His comments, as they so often did, brought a shot of pure caffeine, awakening thinking about matters I assumed I already understood fairly well.” — Julia Preston “I always felt I was joining a fraternity that brought together the most interesting, unfettered minds, the most thoughtful editorial standards, and the best of the written word.” — Orville Schell“He believed in the writer so much. Nobody I have ever worked for gave me such an inspiration and thrill to be writing, researching, putting words to paper, as Bob did.” — Ahmed Rashid “He sent me galleys at 11:45 the night before my wedding—and he was a guest at the wedding. In his most painstakingly legible handwriting, he wrote, ‘we hope for corrections soonest.’” — David Kaiser “I once expressed doubt that an obscure subject would interest readers. ‘Well,’ Bob countered, ‘does it interest you?’ That, he made clear, was the standard, the only standard.” — Christopher Benfey “The words that came immediately to mind yesterday when I learned of Bob’s passing were these from Wordsworth: ‘The best portion of a good man’s life, his little, nameless, unremembered acts of kindness and of love.’” — Sue Halpern “When Bob wanted an article, he really wanted it, and was determined to get it.” — Garry Wills “Always, always, what impelled him was an almost superhuman capacity for devotion.” — Alma Guillermoprieto “The sense of immediacy and high excitement that Bob brought to the inherently solitary task of writing was just part of his magic, but it gave you an exhilarating sense that what one thought and expressed mattered tremendously if it mattered so much to him.” — Martin Filler “He was the only editor I knew for whom the editing process could require more thought and effort than the drafting of the original article.” — Kenneth Roth “I think of our rip-roaring lunches, stories and laughter—gossip and politics and books—effervescence! incandescence!—such a fine time!” — Frederick Seidel “Our twenty years of fruitful friendship were based on deep respect and restraint.” — Freeman Dyson “In one of my first articles, I used the phrase ‘in terms of.’ He insisted on deleting it, because, he explained, writers used it as filler when they thought there was some relation between A and B but did not know what the relation was.” — Robert Darnton “What I’ve been thinking most about is the utterly unique way in which his eyes would twinkle when something pleased or delighted him, when I’d written something that he thought might incite some controversy: a disturbance in the culture.” — Francine Prose “He was a man worth writing for, worth grieving for, and will be much missed.” — Annie Sparrow “I had the impression that he always had the Review’s whole archive in mind all the time, with each piece another element in that larger structure.” — Geoffrey O’Brien “The loss to all his writers is profound, and the loss to our poor imperiled world, incalculable.” — Robert Gottlieb The New York Review of Books 435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014 [Preferences]( | [Unsubscribe](