I see the best minds of my generation destroyed by living too long.
Jason Epstein, who died Feb. 4 of congestive heart failure at age 93, founded the New York Review of Books, which broadened my intellectual outlook when I somehow discovered it as a disaffected student at LSU in the early 1970s.
He was of an older generation of clubby New York intellectuals, but his New York Review was a major influence on the 1960s protest movements.
Todd Gittlin, a member of my generation and one of its mentors, died the next day at age 79 in a hospital in Pittsfield, Mass., where he was taken Dec. 31 after suffering cardiac arrest at his home in nearby Hillsdale, N.Y.
A president of the SDS student protest group during the 1960s, Gitlin as a professor at the University of California at Berkeley, New York University and Columbia University gained fame as a media, political and social critic and chronicler of the 1960s.
The leftist author drew ire for claiming that progressives' focus on identity politics, multiculturalism and political correctness impeded political and social gains, as Gitlin's obituary in The New York Times noted.
"While the right has been busy taking the White House, the left has been marching on the English department," Gitlin wrote in the 1995 book "The Twilight of Common Dreams: Why America Is Wracked by Cultural Wars."
Before co-founding the New York Review of Books during the disastrous New York newspaper strike of 1962-63 along with Robert Lowell and his wife, Elizabeth Hardwick, Epstein as a young editor at Doubleday had the idea of publishing affordable paperback editions of literary classics. His Anchor Books was a hit with readers, revolutionizing the publishing industry as "quality paperbacks" of noted literary works became common.
Along with Edmund Wilson, Epstein also launched the "Library of America" series, republishing a range of American authors in distinctive editions with their black dust jackets and dramatic white type.
Along with famous American authors like Mark Twain, Edith Wharton and Walt Whitman, the series has also given attention to forgotten writers of science fiction, detective and crime fiction, horror and other genres. The series has also published anthologies of sports, war and film journalism.
Epstein's first wife, Barbara Epstein, gained renown for her editorial acumen in shaping the New York Review of Books, along with co-editor Robert Silvers.
In a strange change of direction, Epstein's second wife, Judith Miller, was reviled for her role in leading the United States into invading Iraq after Sept. 11, 2001.
As a New York Times reporter, Miller wrote several stories alleging that Iraq had materials for "weapons of mass destruction," the rationale for the George W. Bush administration invading Iraq and overthrowing former ally Saddam Hussein. Miller, who survives Epstein, was subsequently fired from The Times, later reviving her career as a commentator for Rupert Murdoch's Fox News and The Wall Street Journal.
The New York Times, in its obituary of Epstein written by the late Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, conspicuously fails to mention Miller's downfall at the newspaper. Lehmann-Haupt was another member of the New York literary establishment, editing the New York Times Sunday Book Review before being farmed out to writing obituaries late in his career.
Gitlin's best known book, "The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage," looked back on the era's battles and his days as a radical leader of student rebellion against the Vietnam War.
In "The Whole World Is Watching: Mass Media in the Making and the Unmaking of the New Left," he criticized the media's distortions and misleading reporting of left-wing movements.
The book-centered, combative worlds of Epstein and Gitlin have vanished. Gitlin's warnings of a rising American totalitarianism appear increasingly prescient. Epstein's Library of America champions the triumphs of American freedom of expression, threatened by right-wing zealotry.