The New York Times Great Lives of the Twentieth Century [antikvár]

INTRODUCTION T r-|—\ he reporter from The New York Times was walking near her Manhattan home when she saw the elderly playwright she had interviewed a few weeks earlier. "Well, how are you these days?" she asked brightly. The playwright looked at her, laughed a small and mirthless laugh, and said: "Obviously better than you think I am." It was not the cheeriest way to begin a conversation in the street but there seemed no point in denying it. The reporter had been assigned to the interview because she and her editors considered the playwright a likely candidate for death in the not-too-distant future; otherwise they would not have bothered sending her over. Happily, the playwright lives at this writing, several years later, but then you cannot win them all. Still, he will no doubt die one day, and his obituary will be ready in a special file at The Times— carefully written, facts checked, appraisals of peers and pithy quotations from his works included, and the total space devoted to his time on earth generous by any reasonable measure. The playwright knew perfectly well that the reporter was working in a fairly new specialty in journalism—she was a skilled practitioner of writing obituaries in advance of the subject's death. He consented to the interview because he wanted the news- paper to do him justice in the edition he would miss. He preferred the reminder of his age and infirmity that the visit implied—never stated, of course—to having to put up, even in absentia, with a slipshod, hastily prepared final review of his life. He was convinced that if there was an afterUfe, the irritation of a poorly done obituary in The New York Times would follow him. And he was fully aware that the very fact that The Times had selected his hfe story to be included in the file of "advance obituaries" was a substantial compliment, however somber. Not all advance obituaries are written by journalists who devote themselves to that craft. On The Times, which pays high professional respect to advance obituary writers, most obituaries written before a subject's death are still turned out by experts in the fields in which the honored subjects spent their own lives. Alden Whitman and Albin Krebs, talented advance obit writers, produced about a dozen of the biographies in this book. But the paper's editors also call upon the special knowledge gained through years, sometimes decades, of endeavor by other members of the staff. For example, Anna KisselgofF, dance critic of The Times, was asked to write the obituary of George Balanchine. The famous foreign correspondent Homer Bigart wrote of David Ben-Gurion. Hanson Baldwin, long the Times'^ military correspondent. X 1 X