QUILLBLOG

Former Esquire fiction editor dies

Ted Solotaroff wasn’t the only legendary American fiction editor to die last week. L. Rust Hills worked at Esquire on and off from the late 1950s through the late 1990s, bringing to its pages such writers as Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, Ann Beattie, and Annie Proulx. From the San Francisco Chronicle:

He was not well known to the public, but in literary circles Mr. Hills was held in almost the same regard as Maxwell Perkins, who edited Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Thomas Wolfe in the 1920s and 1930s, and William Maxwell, a longtime fiction editor at the New Yorker magazine.

“I don’t know anybody who had higher literary standards,” said writer Will Blythe, who worked with Mr. Hills at Esquire for 10 years. “I’d go so far as to say that he made the magazine’s reputation for literature.”

Mr. Hills persuaded Bellow and Roth to write for Esquire and, when needed, could soothe writers’ sensitive egos. After Mailer left the magazine in a dispute over editing, “it was Rust Hills who brought (him) back to Esquire, adding volume and resonance to the magazine’s new voice,” Carol Polsgrove wrote in her history of Esquire in the 1960s, “It Wasn’t Pretty, Folks, But Didn’t We Have Fun?”

Hills was 83; his widow is the novelist Joy Williams.