Clay Felker

Clay Schuette Felker (October 2 1925 – July 1 2008) was an American magazine editor and journalist who founded New York Magazine in 1968.

Birth and education

He was born on October 2 1925, in Webster Groves, Missouri, the son of Carl Felker, an editor of The Sporting News, and his wife, the former Cora Tyree, the former women's editor of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. He had one sibling, Charlotte. The family surname was originally von Fredrikstein.

Felker attended Duke University, where he edited the student newspaper, The Chronicle, but left school in 1943 to join the Navy.

After returning to Duke and graduating in 1951, Felker went on to work as a sportswriter for Life Magazine. He later worked for TIME, Esquire, and the New York Herald Tribune. A long-time friend of Tom Wolfe, Felker was one of the early proponents of New Journalism. After founding New York Magazine in 1968, one of his first features was Wolfe's coverage of Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters, a story Wolfe later expanded into his non-fiction novel The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. Felker resigned from New York following its hostile takeover by Rupert Murdoch in 1976.

Felker later became a lecturer at the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley.

Marriages

Felker was married three times:

• Leslie Blatt, a fellow Duke undergraduate, in 1949; they later divorced.
• Pamela Tiffin, an actress and fashion model, whom he married in 1962 and divorced in 1969.
• Gail Sheehy, the writer, in 1984. By this marriage he had two stepdaughters, Mohm Sheehy, whom his third wife adopted from Cambodia, and Maura Sheehy Moss.

Death

He died on July 1 2008 in Manhattan of natural causes. During his later years he had a long bout with throat cancer.

External links

• City of Clay: a collection of tributes
• Faculty Profile at Berkeley
• Interview in SF Chronicle
• Literary Journalism: A Biographical Dictionary of Writers and Editors
• Tom Wolfe on How Clay Felker Changed New York
• Gloria Steinem, Gore Vidal and others remember Clay Felker

References