Robert Benjamin Silvers (December 31, 1929 – March 20, 2017) was an American editor who was editor of The New York Review of Books from 1963 to 2017.

Raised on Long Island, New York, Silvers graduated from the University of Chicago in 1947 and attended Yale Law School, but he left before graduating and worked as press secretary to Chester Bowles in 1950. He worked at The Paris Review as an editor, and from 1959 to 1963 he was an associate editor of Harper's Magazine in New York.

Silvers was co-editor of The New York Review of Books with Barbara Epstein for 43 years, until she died in 2006, and was the sole editor of the paper after that until his own death in 2017. Philip Marino of Liveright Publishing wrote of him: "Like a chemist pairing ingredients to induce a specific reaction, Silvers has built his career matching the right author and subject, in hopes of generating an exciting and illuminating result."Marino, Philip. "Book Smart", The University of Chicago Magazine, University of Chicago, May–June 2012, accessed June 25, 2014. Silvers edited or co-edited several essay anthologies. He appeared prominently in the 2014 documentary film about the Review, The 50 Year Argument.

Silvers' honors include the National Book Foundation's Literarian Award, the American Academy of Arts and Letters' Award for "Distinguished Service to the Arts", the Ivan Sandrof Award for Lifetime Achievement in Publishing and a National Humanities Medal.

Life and career Early life and education

Silvers was born in Mineola, New York, and grew up in Farmingdale and then Rockville Centre, New York. His parents were James J. Silvers (1893–1986), a salesman, sometime farmer and small business owner, and Rose Roden Silvers (1895–1979), a music and arts columnist for The New York Globe, restaurateur, and one of the first female radio hosts for RCA."Robert Silvers – Wry, philosophical and unapologetically intellectual editor of The New York Review of Books for more than half a century", The Times March 29, 2017, p. 43Violino, Bob. "Rose Silvers Columnist, 83", New York Newsday, August 10, 1979, p. 47 He had one brother, Edwin D. Silvers (1927–2000), a civil engineer. His paternal grandparents were Romanian Jewish immigrants, and his maternal grandparents were Russian Jews."Robert B Silvers", Family Search, accessed March 20, 2017; and Prager, Dennis and Joseph Telushkin (2007). Why the Jews?: The Reason for Antisemitism, p. 50, Simon and Schuster, . Silvers graduated from the University of Chicago with a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1947 (at the age of 17) after completing an accelerated two-year program and attended Yale Law School for three semesters,Grimes, William. "Robert Silvers, a Founding Editor of New York Review of Books, Dies at 87", The New York Times, March 20, 2017Danner, Mark. "Editing the New York Review of Books: A Conversation with Robert B. Silvers" , April 28, 1999. Interview at U.C. Berkeley; and "Robert Silvers on The Company They Kept", The Book Show, September 20, 2006, accessed April 20, 2009. but left "disillusioned with the law".Bass, Carole. "Oh, the humanities: 2.5 Yalies honored with NEH medals", Yale Alumni Magazine, July 11, 2013

Early career: 1950–1962 Silvers worked as press secretary to Connecticut Governor Chester Bowles in 1950, who was campaigning for reelection.Stokes, Emily. "Lunch with the FT: Robert B Silvers", Financial Times, January 25, 2013. During the Korean War he served in the U.S. Army, which sent him to the Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe Headquarters in Paris in 1952 as a speechwriter and press aide.Gevisser, Mark. "Robert Silvers on the Paris and New York Reviews" , The Paris Review, March 20, 2012. While in Paris, he attended the Sorbonne and Paris Institute of Political Studies (known as Sciences Po), eventually receiving its certificat de diplôme (diploma certificate). His official duties left him time to work as an editor of a quarterly magazine published by the World Assembly of Youth and as a commissioning editor representing a small publishing company, Noonday Press.Aldrich, Nelson W. (ed.) George, Being George: George Plimpton's Life as Told, Admired, Deplored, and Envied by 200 Friends, Relatives, Lovers, Acquaintances, Rivals, Random House Publishing (2008) pp. 120–123 and passim.

In 1954, while working for Noonday, he met and befriended George Plimpton, editor of the new magazine The Paris Review, and after Silvers' discharge from the Army a few months later, Plimpton invited him to become managing editor. Plimpton returned to the U.S. in 1955, leaving Silvers in charge; living on a barge on the Seine with a friend, Silvers served as managing editor until 1956. Plimpton later said that Silvers "made The Paris Review what it was".Silvers, Robert. "The Revel: 8, rue Garancière". Remarks made on April 3, 2012, at The Paris Review, printed May 7, 2012 Silvers continued his studies at the same time.Cooke, Rachel. "Robert Silvers interview: 'Someone told me Martin Scorsese might be interested in making a film about us. And he was'", The Observer, June 7, 2014.

Silvers returned to New York in 1958, becoming associate editor of Harper's Magazine, where he remained until 1963. For an issue of the magazine in 1959 focusing on the state of writing in America, he engaged Elizabeth Hardwick to contribute her essay "The Decline of Book Reviewing", which fifty years later he described as "one of the most thrilling pieces I've ever published".Adams, Phillip."Remembering Bob Silvers", Australian Broadcasting Company, 22 March 2017, 1 minute 10 seconds onwards It became an inspiration for the founding of The New York Review of Books (NYRB). In 1960, he edited the book Writing in America and translated La Gangrene, which describes the brutal torture of seven Algerian men by the Paris Security Police in 1958, shortly after Charles de Gaulle came to power.Church, Christopher. "Testament to Torture: The Gangrene Affair", Journal of Undergraduate Research, Vol. 8, Issue 3, January/February 2007.Haffner, Peter. "We Do What We Want" , 032c, Issue #23, Winter 2012/2013, accessed July 21, 2014.

New York Review During the 1962–63 New York City newspaper strike, when The New York Times and six other newspapers suspended publication, Hardwick, her husband Robert Lowell, and Jason and Barbara Epstein, saw an opportunity to introduce the sort of vigorous book review that Hardwick had imagined.Jason Epstein recounts the story of the initial meeting of the Epsteins, Hardwick and Lowell in "A Strike and a Start: Founding The New York Review", NYR Blog, The New York Review of Books, March 16, 2013 Jason Epstein knew that book publishers would advertise their books in the new publication, since they had no other outlet for promoting new books.Harvey, Matt. "Brawls and books: Skepticism lives on as New York Review of Books ages but thrives", The Villager, vol. 78, no. 24, November 12–18, 2008, reprinted in Downtown Express, Vol. 21, No. 28, November 21, 2008. The group asked Silvers, who was still at Harper's, to edit the issue, and Silvers asked Barbara Epstein to co-edit it with him.Fassler, Joe. "A 50-Year Protest for Good Writing", The Atlantic, October 1, 2014; and Brown, Andrew. "The writer's editor", The Guardian, January 24, 2004Kolhatkar, Sheelah. "Robert Silvers", The New York Observer, December 19, 2005, p. 30 Silvers and Epstein "became an inseparable double act", editing The New York Review of Books together for the next 43 years, until her death in 2006.McGrath, Charles. "Barbara Epstein, Editor and Literary Arbiter, Dies at 77", The New York Times, June 17, 2006, accessed April 20, 2009; and Atlas, James. "The Ma and Pa of the Intelligentsia", New York Magazine, September 25, 2006, accessed April 6, 2017 Silvers continued as sole editor until his death in March 2017. In later years, he described his motivation for continuing to edit the Review: "I feel it's a fantastic opportunity – because of the freedom of it, because of the sense that there are marvelous, intensely interesting, important questions that you have a chance to try to deal with in an interesting way. That's an extraordinary opportunity in life. And you'd be crazy not to try and make the most of it." He said on another occasion: "We do what we want and don't try to figure out what the public wants." Asked in 2007 about who might succeed him as editor, Silvers replied: "It's not a question that's posing itself."Neyfakh, Leon. What's New at The New York Review of Books?" The New York Observer, December 13, 2007, accessed October 15, 2017

Silvers also edited or co-edited several essay anthologies, including Writing in America (1960); A Middle East Reader: Selected Essays on the Middle East (1991); The First Anthology: Thirty Years of the New York Review (1993); Hidden Histories of Science (1995); India: A Mosaic (2000); Doing It: Five Performing Arts (2001), a collection of essays on the performing arts; The Legacy of Isaiah Berlin (2001); Striking Terror (2002); The Company They Kept (vol. 1, 2006; vol. 2, 2011); The Consequences to Come: American Power After Bush (2008); and The New York Review Abroad: Fifty Years of International Reportage (2013).Books published by the NY Review; and "The New York Review Abroad: Fifty Years of International Reportage", Publishers Weekly, February 4, 2013. In 2009, he wrote the essay "Dilemmas eines Herausgebers" ("Dilemmas of an editor") appearing in the Austrian journal Transit – Europäische Revue."Charismatic megafauna". Eurozine, January 13, 2010 review of articles including "Dilemmas of an Editor" in Transit – Europäische Revue, vol. 38 (2009). He also served on the editorial committee of La Rivista dei Libri, the Italian-language edition of the Review,Freedlander, David. "Bloomberg Names Winners of Inaugural NYC Literary Awards", Politicker.com, April 26, 2012. until it closed in 2010.Erbani, Francesco. "la Rivista dei Libri ha Deciso di Chiudere ma Torna Alfabeta", la Repubblica, May 12, 2010, accessed February 5, 2013 (in Italian).

Personal life and death Silvers never married or had children. He was linked romantically in the 1960s with Lady Caroline Blackwood.Brubach, Holly. "Their Better Half". The New York Times, August 17, 2010.Gaines, Steven. "Ivana Lowell, Sober Guinness Heiress Raised by Poet, Says What Happened". New Yorker magazine, September 19, 2010 For more than four decades from 1975 until her death, he lived with Grace, Countess of Dudley (1923–2016), widow of the 3rd Earl of Dudley,Death notice: Countess of Dudley, The New York Times, December 31, 2016 with whom he shared a passion for opera.Scott, Janny. "Ideas: One Mind, But What A Mind; Defining the Passions Of the Liberal Elite For Over 2 Decades", The New York Times, November 1, 1997. Silvers commented that Dudley's "fineness of mind and spirit has been the center of my life". A long-time vegetarian, Silvers "was struck by the essays of... moral philosopher Peter Singer, who has written extensively about animal rights."

Silvers died on March 20, 2017, at the age of 87, at his Manhattan home after a short illness.Weldon, Glen. "Robert Silvers, Longtime Editor of The New York Review of Books, Dies at 87", NPR, March 20, 2017 A memorial service was hosted by the New York Public Library in April 2017.Krementz, Jill. "Jill Krementz Remembers Robert B. Silvers", New York Social Diary, April 28, 2017 Silvers and Grace Dudley are buried together in Switzerland.

Reputation