N.Y. Review of Books Founder Barbara Epstein Dies

Barbara Epstein, a founding editor of the New York Review of Books, a journal of ideas that has helped define intellectual discourse in the English-speaking world for the past four decades, died June 16 of lung cancer at her Manhattan apartment. She was 77.

With her co-editor, Robert Silvers, Ms. Epstein edited the biweekly Review since its founding in 1963. With their connections in the highest reaches of academia, arts and letters, they recruited a glittering cast of intellectual all-stars to write for the publication, which Esquire magazine called "the premier literary-intellectual magazine in the English language."

The Review was born over a dinner table during a 114-day New York newspaper strike. With the New York Times Book Review shuttered, Ms. Epstein and her husband at the time, writer and publishing executive Jason Epstein, devised the idea with their neighbors, poet Robert Lowell and his wife, Elizabeth Hardwick.

They hired Silvers as co-editor and brought out the first edition on Feb. 1, 1963, with essays by such literary luminaries as W.H. Auden, Norman Mailer, Gore Vidal, Susan Sontag, William Styron, Robert Penn Warren, Mary McCarthy and Irving Howe.