In Memoriam: William Whitworth, revered writer-editor, dead at 87

•  SAM ROBERTS

NEW YORK: William Whitworth, who wrote revealing profiles in The New Yorker giving voice to his idiomatic subjects and polished the prose of some of the nation’s celebrated writers as its associate editor before transplanting that magazine’s painstaking standards to The Atlantic, where he was editor in chief for 20 years, died in Conway, Ark., near Little Rock. He was 87.

As a young college graduate, Whitworth forsook 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 exhilarating voices in American journalism, among them Dick Schaap, Jimmy Breslin and Tom Wolfe.

In 1966, William Shawn, The New Yorker’s decorous but dictatorial editor, wooed Whitworth to the venerated weekly. He took the job although he had already accepted one at The New York Times.

At The New Yorker, he injected wit into pensive “Talk of the Town” vignettes. He also profiled the famous and the not so famous, including the jazz greats Dizzy Gillespie and Charles Mingus (accompanied by photos from his former Herald Tribune colleague Jill Krementz) and the foreign policy adviser Eugene V. Rostow. He expanded his profile of Rostow into a 1970 book, “Naïve Questions About War and Peace.”

Whitworth offered every individual he profiled ample opportunity to be quoted, providing each with equally ample petards on which to hoist himself. In 1966, with characteristic detachment, he wrote about Bishop Homer A. Tomlinson, an amiable Queens man who had run a small advertising agency and now, presiding over a Church of God flock, had proclaimed himself King of the World. Bishop Tomlinson claimed millions of congregants — including all Pentecostals. “He thinks they are his,” Whitworth wrote, “whether they know it or not.”

Of Joe Franklin, the durable television and radio host, 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 through 1980 at The New Yorker, and then at the venerable Atlantic Monthly, where he was editor until retiring in 1999, and later when he worked on books, Whitworth was most valued as a non-fiction editor. Apart from the writers he shepherded, prodded and protected, his role was largely unheralded outside the publishing industry. To colleagues who often wondered why he abandoned reporting, he suggested that he couldn’t lick ‘em, so he joined then: He had simply become fed up with newspaper editors in particular, mangling his prose which would nonetheless be published under his byline.

“You want to fail on your own terms, not in somebody else’s voice that sounds like you,” he said at the Oxford American Summit for Ambitious Writers in 2011.

Whitworth edited implacable perfectionists like the film critic Pauline Kael (who nearly came to blows with Shawn) and Robert A. Caro