Richard Lingeman, longtime executive editor of The Nation, dies at 95

A man of few spoken words, on the page he was a marvel.

Richard Lingeman, The Nation’s longtime executive editor, died on July 5 at the age of 95. As the tributes collected here eloquently attest, Richard was a quiet force at the magazine for more than three decades.

Born in Indiana, he was famous in The Nation offices for being a man of few spoken words. On the page, however, he was a marvel, lovingly and laboriously tightening the prose and improving the arguments of writers well-known and obscure. He also wrote many important and memorable pieces himself. In The Nation and elsewhere, Lingeman was a master of the art of “Reviewmanship,” as he titled a still-scintillating 1984 essay in our pages:

“Practitioners of Reviewmanship recognize that the primary purpose of reviewing a book is to display one’s talents, punish an enemy or achieve power.”

(Subscribers can find the piece, as well as all of Lingeman’s Nation work, in the digital archive.)

Yet Richard’s capacious knowledge of American history, literature, and politics is undoubtedly best captured by the books he himself published, including:

• Widely praised biographies of Sinclair Lewis and Theodore Dreiser (a fellow Indiana native)
• Studies of small-town America and the home front during World War II
• Double Lives, an insightful depiction of literary friendships

“The magnitude of Mr. Lingeman’s research,” a New York Times critic once wrote, “is not just impressive, it is appalling.”

Richard Kreitner

I believe I was one of the last fresh-faced up-and-comers at The Nation to work with Richard, starting in 2012. He was putting together a collection of Gore Vidal’s writings for the magazine, and I was assigned to help. We later did the same for Kurt Vonnegut.

A few months into our collaboration, I visited Richard at his Upper West Side apartment to interview him about his latest (and last) book, The Noir Forties: The American People From Victory to Cold War—a riveting study of the cultural and political context behind the rapid rise and fall of the film genre, partly informed, as he explained, by his own work for US intelligence in Japan in that period. Richard’s late wife, Anthea, served us tea, and we spoke for hours.

“I’m a small actor in the currents of history,” he told me as the light waned in his study, “and I’m just trying to understand.”

Katrina vanden Heuvel

My first image of Richard Lingeman was of him sitting at his desk in front of a typewriter that must have dated to the time of The Nation’s founding in 1865. Richard seemed a part of that desk, rarely getting up from it as he edited or eyeballed every piece of copy that appeared in the then-weekly issues of the magazine.

It was roughly 1980 or 1981, and I was a Nation intern. There was no web or social media back then, nor computers or even fax machines. I remember Richard asking me to use the teletype machine tucked into a corner in the office to send copy to Kai Bird, who was then in the Middle East. Richard was the kindest man—always patient with the interns and the most difficult writers.

When Victor Navasky and Hamilton Fish had bought the magazine in 1977, they brought Richard to The Nation as executive editor. Richard had worked with Victor at the satirical quarterly Monocle, and at the New York Times Book Review. Victor trusted Richard completely. They seemed to have telepathic powers of communication, a language no one else could fully understand. He was Victor’s editor. And he was the editor whom Victor relied on to formalize the many assignments he often casually made at cocktail parties.

Then there were the joint projects, like Starr’s Last Tape, a one-character play satirizing the Monica Lewinsky affair. Richard’s own writing was splendid, as in his biographies of Theodore Dreiser and Sinclair Lewis, his social history of the American home front during World War II, and his final book, The Noir Forties.

Richard was a quiet man from Crawfordsville, Indiana, whose satirical spirit and innate kindness speak to the only “ism” he ever really adhered to: humanism.

Roane Carey

Richard Lingeman, longtime executive editor of The Nation, at the magazine’s copy office sometime in the 1990s. (Judith Long)