George Plimpton

George Ames Plimpton — American writer and Paris Review co-founder whose participatory journalism put an amateur's body on the line for a professional's story — died in New York City on September 25, 2003. He was seventy-six. Born March 18, 1927, in New York, he studied at Harvard and Cambridge, helped launch a literary quarterly that prized interviews and fiction, and then walked into boxing rings, football huddles, and symphony pits so readers could feel the bruise of trying. Paper Lion and other books turned failure into literature without mocking the athletes who let him in. The patrician accent never quite hid the curiosity; friends said dying seemed unlike him. He edited for half a century while moonlighting as the republic's most charming interloper. Manhattan was birthplace and last apartment. He died in his sleep of cardiac arrest, leaving a magazine still interviewing writers and a shelf of books that treat courage as a willingness to look foolish in public. He threw batting practice, stood in for goalies, and played triangle in the Philharmonic so the sentences would smell like sweat. The Paris Review interviews he stewarded remain a master class in letting writers talk until the craft appears. He died in New York on September 25, 2003. Literary parties still miss the tall man asking one more question. Plimpton's gift was graceful immersion — proving reportage could sweat without losing its manners. Notice Nearby keeps the death date so September 25 remembers the New York editor who made amateurs heroic on the page.