It was as much a part of him as his love of jazz, his understated sartorial consistency, and his deep dismay when encountering the misuse of lie and lay, a battle he knew he had lost but continued to fight. Bill, who greatly expanded The Atlantic's topical range and cultural presence, died in March in Conway, Arkansas, near his hometown of Little Rock, at the age of 87.
Bill was a mentor to two generations of writers. His editorial instincts were penetrating, but couched in a manner that was calm and grounded. James Fallows, a longtime contributor to The Atlantic, remembers their initial meeting:
"Mr. Fallows," he said softly, "I'm Bill Whitworth." Thus began an hour of his patiently asking me about how The Atlantic worked, and how much I was paid, and why I'd made this or that choice in the recent stories I'd done. Bill entirely directed our first conversation with seemingly simple questions: Did you think about this? Why did you write that? Can you explain what the experts are saying? What if they're all wrong? Who did you want to talk with who got left out? What do you still need to know?
Bill was born in Hot Springs, Arkansas, in 1937. He started as a reporter for the Arkansas Gazette and, in 1963, followed his Gazette colleague and close friend Charles Portis to Manhattan to take a job at the New York Herald Tribune, where his newsroom colleagues included Tom Wolfe, Jimmy Breslin, Dick Schaap, and the photographer Jill Krementz. There, Bill covered Robert F. Kennedy's Senate race, the first Harlem riots, the free-speech movement at Berkeley, the Vietnam anti-war protests-he got tear-gassed a lot and the Beatles' first trip to the United States. He was in the Ed Sullivan Show studio for their American-television debut.
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