19 Facts About Clay Felker

Clay Schuette Felker was an American magazine editor and journalist who co-founded New York magazine in 1968 and California magazine in 1976.

Clay Felker was known for bringing numerous journalists into the profession.

Clay Felker was born in 1925 in Webster Groves, Missouri, son of Carl Felker, an editor of The Sporting News, and his wife, the former Cora Tyree, the former women's editor of the St Louis Post-Dispatch.

Clay Felker attended Duke University, where he first became interested in journalism and edited the student newspaper, The Duke Chronicle.

Clay Felker left school in 1943 to join the Navy, but returned to the school to graduate in 1951.

Clay Felker developed an article he wrote about Casey Stengel as a full-length book, Casey Stengel's Secret.

Clay Felker was on the development team for Sports Illustrated and was features editor for Esquire.

Clay Felker gave Gloria Steinem what she later called her first "serious assignment", regarding contraception; he didn't like her first draft and had her re-write the article.

Clay Felker's resulting 1962 article, about the way in which women are forced to choose between a career and marriage, preceded Betty Friedan's book The Feminine Mystique by one year.

Clay Felker revamped a Sunday section into New York and hired writers such as Tom Wolfe and Jimmy Breslin.

Clay Felker sniffed the great consumer revolution with its social, political, and aesthetic implications.

Clay Felker became editor-in-chief and publisher of The Village Voice in 1974; he resigned from New York following its hostile takeover by Rupert Murdoch in 1976.

Clay Felker bought Esquire in 1977 but sold it in 1979.

In 1976, Clay Felker founded New West as New York's sister publication covering the West Coast.

In 1987, Clay Felker became editor of the business magazine Manhattan, inc.

In 1994, Clay Felker became a lecturer at the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley.

Clay Felker taught a course called "How to Make a Magazine" at the Felker Magazine Center, named in his honor and of which he became director.

Clay Felker died on July 1,2008, in Manhattan from what his wife, Gail Sheehy, described as "natural causes", following a long battle with throat cancer.

Clay Felker created a kind of magazine that had never been seen before, told a kind of story that had never been told.