Ted Solotaroff papers

1931-2008

Ted Solotaroff was an American editor, literary critic, and writer. He founded the influential literary magazine New American Review (later American Review) and was an editor at Commentary, Book Week, and a senior editor at Harper & Row (later HarperCollins). His work has been published in Commentary, Partisan Review, The New York Times, The New York Times Book Review, Esquire, The New Republic, and The Nation.

Solotaroff was born in 1928 in Elizabeth, New Jersey, served in the United States Navy between 1946 and 1948, graduated from the University of Michigan in 1952, and received his Master's degree from the University of Chicago in 1956. Between 1956 and 1960 he did further graduate work there and taught English there and at Indiana University.

In 1957 Solotaroff met Philip Roth, when they were both Ph.D. students at Chicago. The two quickly became friends and Roth helped begin Solotaroff's career by recommending him to the editor of The Times Literary Supplement to write an essay on American Jewish writers. The essay was seen by Norman Podhoretz, the editor of Commentary, who hired him as an associate editor at the magazine in 1960. Solotaroff worked at Commentary until 1966. For the next nine months he was the editor-in-chief of Book Week, the literary supplement of the New York Herald Tribune.

In 1967 Solotaroff founded the New American Review (NAR), a paperback literary magazine published by the New American Library. According to Solotaroff, NAR would avoid "the tendency toward cult and coterie by which literary magazines usually define their particular territory and assert their standards." NAR was a literary journal produced as a paperback and proclaimed itself "a writer's magazine for the new literary audience." The first issue contained the work of 29 writers, including Roth, William H. Gass, Grace Paley, George Dennison, and Robert Graves. NAR was issued three times a year and contained fiction and nonfiction. The New York Times obituary for Solotaroff described NAR as "less a magazine with recognizable departments and columnists than a rolling literary anthology." Other writers published in NAR include Russell Banks, E. L. Doctorow, Ralph Ellison, Gnter Grass, Ian McEwan (including his first story published in the United States), Norman Mailer, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Cynthia Ozick, V. S. Pritchett, Tom Robbins, Susan Sontag, and Gilbert Sorrentino. NAR never prospered as Solotaroff hoped it would and, in 1970, New American Library stopped publishing it. Solotaroff brought NAR to Simon & Schuster and then Bantam Books, where the name changed to American Review (AR) in 1973. AR continued to struggle financially and ceased publication in 1977.

Between 1970 and 1979, in addition to publishing NAR, Solotaroff worked as an acquiring editor at Bantam Books, where he worked with Mailer, Robbins, and many others. He moved to Harper & Row in 1979 and became a senior editor. There he worked with Yehuda Amichai, Max Apple, Banks, Robert Bly, Hayden Carruth, Bobbie Ann Mason, Sue Miller, Robert Towers, and others.

In 1989 Solotaroff retired as a senior editor to concentrate on his own writing. He continued to work part-time, retiring fully from HarperCollins in 1991. He published his first memoir, Truth Comes in Blows, in 1998 and his second, First Loves, in 2003. He was working on his third memoir at the time of his death in 2008.

Solotaroff was married four times and had four sons. His sons Paul and Ivan were born to his first wife, Lynn Ringler, his son Jason to his second wife, Shirley Fingerhood, and his son Isaac to his third wife, Ghislaine Boulanger. He was married to his fourth wife, Virginia Heiserman at the time of his death.