L. Rust Hills, Esquire's Fiction Editor, Dies At 83

L. Rust Hills, a staunch advocate of contemporary American literature who, as Esquire's curmudgeonly fiction editor in three separate stints from the 1950s through the 1990s, published original works by scores of the country's finest writers, died on Tuesday in Belfast, Me. He was 83 and lived in Key West, Fla.

The cause was cardiac arrest, said a friend, the writer Christopher Buckley.

A shrewd reader with a keen ear for an original voice and a sure sense of the distinction between new writing and merely fashionable writing, Mr. Hills upheld standards he unashamedly thought of as literary. The list of distinguished writers he championed early in and throughout their careers is long and comprises several generations. To name just a handful: Norman Mailer, John Cheever, William Styron, Bruce Jay Friedman, William Gaddis, James Salter, Don DeLillo, Ann Beattie, Richard Ford, Raymond Carver and E. Annie Proulx.

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Comments

[BlueandGreen]

Hill's "How to Retire at 41" was a hoot of a book and some years back I wrote him a fan letter saying so; I received a very gracious reply ... sad to hear of his death.