Ted Solotaroff

Ted Solotaroff (full name Theodore Solotaroff) (October 9, 1928 - August 8, 2008) was an American writer, critic, and editor.

Biography

Born into a working-class Jewish family in Elizabeth, N.J., Solotaroff attended the University of Michigan, graduating in 1952, and did graduate work at the University of Chicago, where he became friends with Philip Roth and dedicated himself to literature. He was an editor at "Commentary" from 1960 to 1966, then in 1967 founded "The New American Review", which was an influential literary journal for the decade of its existence. After it folded, he became an editor at Harper & Row, where he edited Russell Banks, Sue Miller, Robert Bly, Bobbie Ann Mason, and others. "In 1989, when Rupert Murdoch bought Harper & Row, Solotaroff began to do less editing and more writing. He left the book business with a parting shot at what he labeled 'the literary-industrial complex.'" [ [http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/california/la-me-solotaroff14-2008aug14,0,5783375.story Joe Holley, "Washington Post" obituary] ]

He said of the effect of the Sixties on him and his work:

[T] he market for serious writing cracked open in the Sixties and soon became a kind of howling forum where allmanners of ideas, styles and standards contended for attention. As the literary climate altered radically, there was a distinct shift among writers and editors from a preoccupation with values as the ground of experience to a preoccupation with experience as the ground of values—a shift that was, of course, to be felt everywhere in America as the decade of opposition and revision careened along. For those, like myself, who entered the Sixties wedded to their values, the more or less standard ones of academic liberalism and humanism, but quite out of touch with their own experience, this breaking of the ice was alternately exhilarating and dismaying: one felt stirred but also swamped. [Solotaroff, "The Red Hot Vacuum and Other Pieces on the Writing of the Sixties", p. ix.]

He died at his home in East Quogue, NY, of complications from pneumonia; he was survived by his wife of 28 years, Virginia Heiserman Solotaroff (three previous marriages, the first to Lynn Solotaroff, had ended in divorce) and a brother, [Robert Solotaroff] [http://english.cla.umn.edu/contact/solotaroff/] of Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Bibliography

*"The Red Hot Vacuum and Other Pieces on the Writing of the Sixties" (1970)
*"A Few Good Voices in My Head: Occasional Pieces on Writing, Editing, and Reading My Contemporaries" (1987)
*"Truth Comes in Blows: A Memoir" (1998)
*"First Loves: A Memoir" (2003)

References