Daniel Menaker, who died on Monday, at the age of seventy-nine, made a name for himself as the executive editor-in-chief at Random House, where, in the early two-thousands, he published such best-selling authors as Salman Rushdie, Colum McCann, Billy Collins, and Elizabeth Strout. He was always a little ambivalent, though, about the book business, which he more than once called a lottery and a crap shoot. He insisted that his real home—his true family—was The New Yorker, where he had worked for twenty-six years. He started as a fact checker, in 1968, then became a copy editor, and for nineteen years was an editor in the fiction department, where he worked on the stories of Alice Munro, Mavis Gallant, Michael Cunningham, and Michael Chabon, among many others.
Dan came from what he liked to call a mixed marriage. His mother was a New York Wasp who, for years, oversaw the copy department at Fortune, helping to mold that magazine’s distinctive style. His father, a furniture exporter, was a Jewish Communist who spied on Trotsky in Mexico, and Dan’s beloved Uncle Enge (named for Friedrich Engels) helped run a socialist boys’ camp. At The New Yorker, Dan combined elements of both heritages. He was the sort of painstaking, old-school editor who fusses over semicolons, but also part anarchist, bristling against established authority and received wisdom. While still a copy editor, he once had the nerve to tell William Shawn, then the magazine’s editor-in-chief, that an article by Charles A. Reich was no good at all. Shawn suggested that Menaker should start looking for another job. Dan, like a stubborn Bartleby, took his time about that: twenty-three years, to be precise, during which he eventually established himself as an essential and transformative member of the fiction staff, nudging the magazine to open itself to writers like George Saunders and Thom Jones, who, like Dan himself, pushed against the rules a bit. He also lobbied to bring in more foreign authors, championing, for example, the work of Max Frisch and Stanisław Lem.
Dan cared passionately about his writers. He defended them against what he thought was The New Yorker’s overly rigid house style, and sometimes preserved their eccentricities just for their own sake. In this, he took after his great mentor at the magazine, William Maxwell, who first recognized Dan’s editorial talent and insisted that a grudging Shawn give him a chance. Dan was more opinionated than Maxwell, though, and took it hard when—too often, he thought—his fiction colleagues disagreed with him. In time, he became one of the magazine’s better door-slammers.
Mostly his door was open, though, with Dan hunched over a corner of his desk in a way that suggested he had just arrived and might have to take flight at any moment. People were always dropping by, because no one was more fun to be around. Dan loved to kvetch and was brilliant at it. It was a treat, for example, to hear him lash into the magazine’s salary structure. He never lowered his voice, saying that he didn’t care whether he was overheard or not. He seldom worried about conventions or what people thought. He wore black Reeboks with his gray flannels and cultivated a mustache that over the years went in and out of fashion several times without his ever seeming to notice. He loved practical jokes, especially during February, when he would anonymously send out jokey valentines, and also did more than passable imitations of many of The New Yorker’s more eccentric characters. Younger staff members, in particular, sought his company and advice, because they recognized in him a kindred soul—someone who sympathized with their plight and their unformed passions. In 1976, when some young staff members attempted to unionize the magazine, Dan was the only senior figure who—much to Mr. Shawn’s annoyance—took their side.
Above all, Dan Menaker was famous at the magazine just for being funny. The New Yorker began, of course, as a sort of humor magazine, and comic writing remains one of its mainstays. But when Dan arrived, the office itself, though a desirable and much-envied place to work, wasn’t especially lighthearted. A number of people took themselves too seriously. Dan never did, and he brightened the place up. He was funny about almost everything—parrots, cockroaches, wine snobs, oral surgery, off-track betting, folk singing—and funny about himself especially. On at least two occasions, one of his colleagues—me, if you must know—made the mistake of trying to eat a sandwich while listening to one of his monologues and practically died laughing. At the end, he was comical even about his own illness, making jokes about the horrors of hospitals and chemotherapy. “I have something funny to tell you,” he said, in our last conversation. “But I can’t remember what it is.”
