William Whitworth, who wrote revealing profiles in The New Yorker that gave voice to his idiomatic subjects and polished the prose of some of the country’s most celebrated writers as its associate editor before shifting the magazine’s meticulous standards to that of The Atlantic, where he was editor in chief for 20 years, died Friday in Conway, Ark., near Little Rock. He is 87.
His daughter, Katherine Whitworth Stewart, announced the death. He said he was being treated after several falls and surgery at a hospital.
As a young college graduate, Mr. Whitworth left a promising career as a jazz trumpeter to do a different kind of improvisation as a journalist.
He covered breaking news for The Arkansas Gazette and later for The New York Herald Tribune, where his colleagues eventually included some of the most exciting voices in American journalism, including Dick Schaap, Jimmy Breslin and Tom Wolfe.
In 1966, William Shawn, the flamboyant but dictatorial editor of The New Yorker, courted Mr. Whitworth in the respected weekly. He took the job even though he had already accepted one at The New York Times.
At The New Yorker, he injects wit into thoughtful “Talk of the Town” vignettes. He also profiles the famous and not-so-famous, including jazz greats Dizzy Gillespie and Charles Mingus (accompanied by photos from his former Herald Tribune colleague Jill Krementz) and foreign policy adviser Eugene V. Rostov. He expanded his profile of Mr. Rostow in a 1970 book, “Naive Questions About War and Peace.”
Mr. Whitworth offered each individual he profiled ample opportunity to be quoted, giving each equally ample petards on which to hoist himself.
In 1966, with characteristic detachment, he wrote about Bishop Homer A. Tomlinson, a gentle man from Queens who ran a small advertising agency and now, leading a Church of God flock, declared himself who is King of the World. Bishop Tomlinson claimed millions of congregants — including all Pentecostals. “He thinks they are his,” wrote Mr. Whitworth, “whether they know it or not.”
Of Joe Franklin, the stalwart television and radio host, Mr. Whitworth wrote in 1971 that his office, “if it were a person, it would be a bum” — but that “on the air, Joe is more cheerful and positive than Norman Vincent Peale and Lawrence Welk combined.”
From 1973 to 1980 at The New Yorker, and then at the venerable Atlantic Monthly, where he was editor until his retirement in 1999, and later when he worked on books, Mr. Whitworth is respected as a nonfiction editor.
Aside from the writers he shepherded, pushed and protected, his role has not been heralded outside the publishing industry. To colleagues who often wondered why he had abandoned reporting, he suggested that he couldn’t lick them, so he joined then: He was just fed up with editors, especially newspaper editors, who upset the his prose will nevertheless be published under his byline.
“You want to fail on your own terms, not in someone else’s voice that sounds like you,” he says in Oxford American Summit for Aspiring Writers in 2011.
Mr. Whitworth edited inveterate perfectionists such as the film critic Pauline Kael (who nearly exasperated Mr. Shawn) and Robert A. Caro (who later enjoyed the final excerpts from “The Power Broker ,” his biography of Robert Moses , published in The New Yorker — after Mr. Whitworth intervened with Mr. Shawn — that when The Atlantic published a condensation of the first volume of his biography of Lyndon B. Johnson, he asked Mr. Whitworth to edit it).
How did he overcome the rebellious writers?
“As long as you keep them in the game and don’t do things behind their backs, gently explain why it’s going to help them, where it is, it’s protecting them not us, and they come to around,” he said at the Oxford American Summit.
For Mr. Whitworth, says the essayist Anne Fadiman, who worked with him at The American Scholar after he left The Atlantic, “editing is a conversation and also a way of teaching.”
Sometimes Mr. Whitworth offers sage advice that goes beyond editing.
After Garrison Keillor wrote an article for The New Yorker about the Grand Ole Opry, “he pushed me to do a Saturday night show of my own, patterned after the Opry, which led to ‘A Prairie Home Companion,’ which gave me work for years to come,” Mr. Keillor said via email. “Unusual. Like a sportswriter who becomes a major league pitcher, or an obit writer who opens a funeral home. I’ve been thankful ever since.”
New Yorker writer Hendrik Hertzberg wrote on his blog in 2011 despite the ability of Mr. Whitworth in depredicting himself, they have a lot in common with Mr. Shawn, “includes a gentle manner, a keen understanding of writerly neuroses and a deep love of jazz.”
In 1980, Mr. Whitworth was considered the most likely candidate to succeed Mr. Shawn, who was stubbornly unwilling to succeed. Instead of being complicit in what he described to a friend as “parricide” in a plot to oust Mr. Shawn, he accepted the editorship of The Atlantic from its new owner, Mortimer Zuckerman. He has no regrets.
“I got over The New Yorker, a long time ago.” he wrote in a letter to Corby Kummer, a former senior editor and food columnist at The Atlantic — who, he said, “fulfilled all my expectations and hopes.”
“I couldn’t be happier and prouder in any other job,” he added.
Under the editing of Mr. Whitworth, The Atlantic has won nine National Magazine Awards, including the 1993 citation for general excellence.
He also spent months editing the copy for Renée C. Fox’s “In the Field: A Sociologist’s Journey” (2011) in a snail-mail exchange that went on for months without them meeting face-to-face.
The suggestions of Mr. Whitworth, Professor Fox recalled Commentary in 2011, “often written in his distinctive style, always polite, gentlemanly and moderate in tone, sometimes self-deprecating, and often dryly witty.”
“The editor,” he continued, “taught the author about the intellectual, grammatical, aesthetic, historical and moral aspects of writing and editing that were invisible, or unknown, to him before.”
William Alvin Whitworth was born on Feb. 13, 1937, in Hot Springs, Ark. His mother, Lois (McNabb) Whitworth, was a china and silver buyer at Cave’s Jewelers (where she often helped Bill Clinton buy gifts for Hillary). His father, William C. Whitworth, was an advertising executive.
He attended Central High School while working part time as a copy boy in the advertising department of The Arkansas Democrat. After graduation, he majored in English and minored in philosophy at the University of Oklahoma, but dropped out before his senior year to play trumpet in a six-piece jazz band.
He married Carolyn Hubbard; she died in 2005. In addition to their daughter, she is survived by a half-brother, F. Brooks Whitworth. A son, Matthew, died in 2022. Mr. Whitworth has lived in Conway since retiring from The Atlantic.
Literary agent Lynn Nesbit remembers Mr. Whitworth as a “brilliant and intelligent editor” whose “own ego never got in the way of his editorial brilliance.” Charles McGrath, another former New Yorker editor who later edited The New York Times Book Review, said that Mr. Whitworth, unlike Mr. Shawn, was “more loved than feared.”
But he is no pushover. Although he often quotes Mr. Shawn as saying that “lack of perfection is just a never-ending process,” he more or less imitates what he calls the New Yorker’s “neurotic system” of meticulous editing in The Atlantic.
“He taught me that the worst strategy for an editor is to put your feet all over a piece because you know how to fix it and write it better,” said Mr. Kummer, who is now executive director of Food & Society at the Aspen Institute.
“The writer’s name goes on the piece, not yours,” he continued, “and no matter how tight the arguments are on phrasing, punctuation, paragraph order or word choice, the writer has to be happy with a piece or it should not run. .”
When he assigned Mr. Kummer to edit an article by George F. Kennan, the noted diplomat and historian, Mr. Whitworth warned Mr. Kummer in no uncertain terms: “No matter how much work you need, remember: He’s a giant. ”
But when Mr. Kennan later complained that Mr. Kummer “has given me as much trouble as The New Yorker,” Mr. Whitworth, “That’s all I pay him to do.”
