Daniel Menaker, award-winning author and editor, dead at 79

New York, October 28

Daniel Menaker, an award-winning creator of fiction and nonfiction and a longtime editor at The New Yorker and Random House who labored with Alice Munro, Salman Rushdie, Colum McCann and lots of others, has died at age 79.

Menaker’s son, podcaster Will Menaker, introduced on Twitter that he died on Monday of pancreatic most cancers, together with his spouse, the author and editor Katherine Bouton; and his two youngsters at his mattress facet.

“He was me, and I am him in so many ways,” Will Menaker tweeted.

“I miss him terribly, but am struck with a profound feeling that I am the luckiest man alive for having been his son.”          

Daniel Menaker was the creator of a number of books, together with the memoir “My Mistake” and the comedian psychological novel “The Treatment,” tailored right into a 2007 film starring Chris Eigeman and Ian Holm.

He was additionally identified for the O Henry Award-winning title story of his assortment “The Old Left,” which attracts on his early childhood in Greenwich Village and his “red diaper” upbringing: His father allegedly spied on Trotsky in Mexico, the place the exiled Russian revolutionary was ultimately assassinated, on behalf of the Communist Party; an uncle was named for Friedrich Engels.

In dialog, Menaker was usually genial and self-effacing, however he would acknowledge aggressive and boastful sides and was haunted by a household tragedy he helped carry on.

In 1967, throughout a household recreation of contact soccer, he inspired his older and solely brother Mike to play protection, though Mike was troubled by dangerous knees. Mike Menaker tore a ligament and died after surgical procedure when he developed septicemia.

“Somewhere in my hideous id, I killed him,” Menaker wrote in his memoir. “I vanquished him from the field, and spoils are all mine.”              

Menaker was an undergraduate at Swarthmore and obtained a grasp’s diploma at Johns Hopkins University.

He taught at non-public faculty and labored as an editorial assistant on the Prentice Hall publishing home earlier than becoming a member of The New Yorker as a reality checker in 1969.

He remained for greater than 25 years, rising from reality checker to editor, dealing with work by Munro, Pauline Kael and George Saunders amongst others.

He was additionally printed within the journal, beginning with a narrative during which he imagines his brother coming back from the lifeless, “Grief.”                 

In his memoir, he remembered being pushed out of the journal within the mid-1990s by then-editor Tina Brown and handed off to her husband, Harry Evans, who was operating Random House and made Menaker a senior editor.

Over the subsequent decade, his authors included Rushdie and such future prize winners as McCann and Elizabeth Strout.

He additionally took on one in every of publishing’s extra uncommon assignments — the manuscript for the novel about Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential run “Primary Colors,” which he edited with out figuring out who wrote it.

The 1996 bestseller was launched anonymously, though the creator was ultimately revealed to be journalist Joe Klein.

“It reinforced the education I got at Swarthmore, which was very much explicative. You didn’t care who wrote a poem, you just read it,” Menaker advised the Paris Review in 2014.

“I’m not sure that ‘Primary Colors’ is a great work of art. I do know that it’s an awfully good novel, and it was a pleasure to have all the author complications cut away. So that was a sort of purist, graduate-school approach to something that was a commercial publication, but it was great fun.” He was compelled out from Random House in 2007 — his wage was too excessive, his earnings too low, he would recall — and in recent times labored as a guide for Barnes & Noble and on the college for the artistic writing program at SUNY: Stony Brook University. — AP