Adam Bellow is the best editor I’ve ever known.

I say that in the first sentence because the editors who shaped and guided my career as a journalist over the past 40 years would tell me to get to the point—to not, as James Wolcott once wrote, “spend a lot of time warming up.”

So yes, Adam Bellow was my best editor. Adam is the son of Saul Bellow, arguably the greatest American novelist of the 20^th century. He’s the chief of Bombardier Books, the imprint that published my 2022 book The Devil’s Triangle. I am contracted for one final short book with Adam, which I hope to finish this summer before getting out of the journalism business for good.

Before jumping ship, however, I thought it would be useful and worthwhile to offer praise to the editors, like Adam, who changed and shaped my life. The first was my father, who spent his career as one of the top editors at National Geographic. My father taught me how to focus and hone in on my copy—or as best an ADHD kid in the ’70s could do—but more importantly he gave me the desire to defend the truth.

In the 1980s Dad spent five years investigating the spot where Columbus had landed in the New World. His story was the cover of the November 1986 issue of National Geographic. The press conference announcing it was the biggest in the history of the organization. It took place in the Grosvenor Auditorium in NatGeo’s venerable headquarters in downtown Washington, D.C. I was a college student. Dad talked about Columbus, history, and George Orwell. When my father was asked why what might seem like a small geographical dispute had generated such media attention, he invoked Orwell. “In the novel 1984,” he said, “there is a man sitting in a room and a screen comes down. There is a face on the screen, and that face is lying to him. History matters. Getting it right matters. If you don’t care about your history, you wind up being lied to.”

I also learned from Dad that great editors often argue with their writers. This seems to be a lost dynamic today as writers have gotten softer and more sensitive. I’ve found that if I’ve got a good editor, most of the time he or she is right. Along with Adam Bellow, one of the best editors I ever had was a woman named Katherine Boo. Boo won the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service, the MacArthur “genius” award, and the National Book Award for Nonfiction. In the late 1980s she was at the Washington City Paper, where I was a writer. I was in my 20s, reading Tom Wolfe and Hunter Thompson and H.L. Mencken and producing ragged copy. Boo was an expert at slowing me down and helping me build out from the best parts of what I had. The long stories in City Paper would sometimes take weeks to finish. My best effort was a story about my grandfather, a professional baseball player, a piece that eventually became a book.

When Boo went to The Washington Post in 1994, she ran the first article I wrote for that paper. It was about giving up TV for Lent. The first draft was just ok and it just needed something more. Boo began asking me questions about being Catholic, and I told her about the importance of water in the faith—in baptism, in Jesus walking on water, in the wound in the Lord’s side. She was able to tie in that imagery of the rebirth of Lent with giving up watching Miami Vice for Lent. It was brilliant. “Go bring me water,” Boo said as I left to do a rewrite.

Boo was like Maxwell Perkins, who helped to craft works by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and Tom Wolfe. As Vanity Fair once put it, “Before Perkins, book editors had largely mechanical jobs: signing the book and preparing the manuscript for the printer. This one person changed the course of great American literature by working closely with authors to shape their manuscripts.” 

I was also lucky in the 1990s to write for Russ Smith, who had founded the Baltimore City Paper then moved back to New York (he was born in Huntington) and founded New York Press. Russ gave his writers amazing freedom. Matt Zoller Seitz, a film critic for the paper, summed it up beautifully in 2013 when New York Press folded: 

[NYP was] an alternative newspaper as auteurist statement, reflecting the spiky and often bizarre personalities of the people who worked there. The paper didn’t feel like it was trying to be the Village Voice, Chicago Reader, LA Weekly, or any of the other influential alternative weeklies of that era, all of which strove to be comprehensive, mostly sober-minded looks at their respective cities. New York Press was all over the place. The paper favored illustration over photography, and the fonts and margins had a faintly nineteenth-century feel. The editors put whatever the hell they wanted on the cover, whether it was a political column, a film review, or a short story. New York Press was one of the most defiantly noncommercial, unpackaged, personal things I’d ever seen sold in a news box. Russ Smith, who published under the pen name MUGGER, was a right-winger who wrote the longest column in the paper; he spent half of it ranting about politicians and arguing with pundits, and the other half talking about the lavish fun he was having with his family. During the Monica Lewinsky scandal, one of his columns was illustrated with a cartoon that showed Bill Clinton buggering Uncle Sam. Russ didn’t insist that everyone else at the paper follow his lead.

If you could convince Russ that something was interesting, he would run with it, no matter the politics. 

It was also in the 1990s that I wrote a piece, a short book review, that ran in The New Criterion, one of the last great magazines left in America. The editors, Hilton Kramer and Roger Kimball, were like professors who tutored me in art and culture when I became more conservative during the Clinton years. When Hilton Kramer died in 2012 Roger Kimball summed him up well: “As a critic of culture, he had a broad range. He wrote on everything from novels and poetry to dance and philosophy, but it was as an art critic that he was best known. His chief virtue was independence. He called it as he saw it—an increasingly rare virtue in today’s culture.” Likewise, Kimball is one of our last great editors, and I’ve been lucky to have more pieces run in The New Criterion. 

Over time, a quality I noticed more among my editors who were on the right was the ability to push back against conventional wisdom and care more about being truthful with me than they did about my feelings. This is also the case with Julie Ponzi, my editor at Chronicles. Julie is an old-school editor, incapable of being intimidated and bluntly telling you if you’re being lazy or sloppy or just not performing up to your usual standards.

This brings me back to Adam Bellow. Before working with Adam, I knew he had the reputation of being very hands-on, to the point where it annoys some writers. When you share a document with him the screen will come back to you peppered with notes, advice, suggested additions, and directions you’d be foolish to ignore. When writers who find this a little overbearing complain to me, I always remind them that they can always push back. They can tell Adam—or any editor worth his salt—that they disagree with some of the points. Adam is a brilliant man who knows a lot about history, books, writers, and pop culture. I win about half of our battles. He will no doubt disagree.

Adam and I were both heavily influenced by New Journalism, a style of reporting that added literary flair to journalism. Editors were needed to make sure their writers stayed sober and didn’t spiral into incoherence. Clay Felker edited Tom Wolfe, including the story that would become the book The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. Harold Hayes, the editor of Esquire for most of the 1960s, backed writer Gay Talese, who went through $5,000 in expenses writing a profile of Frank Sinatra—a piece which was done without Sinatra’s permission. Jann Wenner reined in Hunter S. Thompson when it was necessary, getting Thompson to produce brilliant work. Rolling Stone also showed real integrity, and the honesty my father talked about, when it covered the disastrous concert the Rolling Stones put on at Altamont. The magazine won the National Magazine Award, the citation praising it for “challenging the shared assumptions of your readers.” I never forgot that phrase.

These days, few editors have much of a sense of adventure—or even a sense of honor. When they get called out for false or malicious reporting, they don’t respond. The days of pushing the envelope, or even having a sense of ribald fun seem to be over. Graydon Carter of Vanity Fair was probably the last great mainstream editor of that kind. He edited Christopher Hitchens, who was great at challenging the shared assumptions of readers. 

I was recently reading An Editor’s Burial: Journals and Journalism from the New Yorker and Other Magazines, a book tie-in to the Wes Anderson film The French Dispatch. It’s a celebration of great journalists and editors from The New Yorker, giants like Harold Ross and William Shawn. The first piece I did for Katherine Boo in the 1980s at the City Paper was about Julian Mazor, a fiction writer whose stories had appeared in The New Yorker during the ’60s I put in a request to interview William Shawn himself, and I’ll never forget the night my apartment phone rang and Shawn was on the other end of the line. Mazor’s stories, Shawn told me, ”had a voice unlike anyone else at the time.”

These days, with AI at the doorstop and biases baked into the cake at most publications, it is difficult to escape the feeling that everybody sounds the same. Still, I am grateful to have known and worked with some of the best in the business and I am hopeful that, in acknowledging them, young and aspiring journalists may imitate them and seek out their wisdom.