Background
Solotaroff, Ted was born on October 9, 1928 in Elizabeth, New Jersey, United States. Son of Ben and Rose (Weiss) Solotaroff.
(Solotaroff was one of the notable intellectuals of his ge...)
Solotaroff was one of the notable intellectuals of his generation, the founder of the New American Review, editor and friend of Philip Roth, and editor-in-chief at HarperCollins. Solotaroff reveals himself here as a thinking man with a big heart and gaping wounds of love that are not disconnected from the contributions he has made to American culture throughout his career. Solotaroff turns back to the earliest pages of his romance with Lynn, remembering his first sighting of her emerging from the water as if from a dream. Yet the image, as he penetrates the intervening layers of sorrow and disappointment, is almost impossibly distant, fragile. First Loves reenacts the blurring of a perfect conception in the mind of a man who would devote his life to precision of thought and word. This opposition, of romantic and intellectual passion, drives the narrative and eventually brings it to crisis. First Loves could be described as a very private feat of honesty from a public intellectual. Solotaroff’s willingness to admit the failures, personal and professional, alongside the triumphs of his career gives a three-dimensional intensity to the emotions on the page. Working with all of the gritty and romantic elements of his storied life, Solotaroff manages to avoid a tone too heroic or honey-dipped; he manages simply to tell the tale.
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Solotaroff, Ted was born on October 9, 1928 in Elizabeth, New Jersey, United States. Son of Ben and Rose (Weiss) Solotaroff.
Born into a working-class Jewish family in Elizabeth, New Jersey, Solotaroff attended the University of Michigan, graduating in 1952, and did graduate work at the University of Chicago, where he became friends with Philip Roth and dedicated himself to literature.
He was an editor at Commentary from 1960 to 1966, then in 1967 founded The New American Review, which was an influential literary journal for the decade of its existence. After it folded, he became an editor at Harper & Row, where he edited works by Russell Banks, Sue Miller, Robert Bly, Bobbie Ann Mason, and others "In 1989, when Rupert Murdoch bought Harper & Row, Solotaroff began to do less editing and more writing.
He left the book business with a parting shot at what he labeled "the literary-industrial complex.""
He said of the effect of the 1960s on him and his work:
he market for serious writing cracked open in the Sixties and soon became a kind of howling forum where all manners of ideas, styles and standards contended for attention.
As the literary climate altered radically, there was a distinct shift among writers and editors from a preoccupation with values as the ground of experience to a preoccupation with experience as the ground of values—a shift that was, of course, to be felt everywhere in America as the decade of opposition and revision careened along. He died at his home in East Quogue, New York from complications from pneumonia, aged 79.
(Solotaroff was one of the notable intellectuals of his ge...)
Served with United States Navy, 1946-1948. Member Phi Beta Kappa.
Married Lynn Ringler (divorced). Married Shirley Fingerhood (divorced). 1 child, Jason; Married Ghislaine Boulanger (divorced).
1 child, Isaac; Married Virginia Martin Heiserman, December 27, 1982. Children: Paul, Ivan.