Joseph Salem Lelyveld

Joseph Lelyveld (born April 5, 1937) was a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author, and a frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books. In all, Lelyveld worked at the Times for nearly 40 years, starting out in 1962. He was the executive editor of the New York Times from 1994 to 2001, and interim executive editor in 2003. He was also foreign editor of the Times, and its managing editor.

Among Lelyveld's books are:

• Move Your Shadow: South Africa, Black and White, based on his reporting from Johannesburg, South Africa, in the 1960s and 1980s.
• Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi

While he was a reporter for the New York Times, Lelyveld received the 1971 George Polk Award for Education Reporting and the 1983 award for Foreign Reporting. He also won a Guggenheim Fellowship. He received the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction in 1986 for Move Your Shadow.

He was awarded an honorary degree (Doctor of Humane Letters) by the CUNY Graduate Center at the 2007 commencement, where he gave the keynote speech.

Of his own career, Lelyveld told students during a Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism commencement speech that:

"I found, through sheer dumb luck, that newspapering suited a deep need I seemed to have to not know what was going to happen next in my life. I found that I thrived on surprise, and that there were people who might pay me to cultivate this instinct."

Family

Lelyveld's father was the Reform Judaism leader Arthur Lelyveld, who was a rabbi and a leader in the Zionist, pacifist, and Civil Rights movements. The Lelyveld family originally came from the Netherlands. His mother was a Shakespeare scholar and former actor. Lelyveld stated that he had "the sense all my life that, at an early age, I was abandoned by my parents, that I was incidental to what was going on in their lives."

Lelyveld was married to pioneering children's healthcare activist Carolyn Fox from 1959 until her death in 2004. They had two daughters. For 19 years until his death, his partner was fellow former Times journalist Janny Scott.

Sources

• McFadden, Robert D. "Joseph Lelyveld, Former Top Editor of The New York Times, Dies at 86." The New York Times, published 5 January 2024. < link > Accessed 6 January 2024.
• 1940 United States Federal Census. < link >

See also

• New York Magazine Review: Omaha Blues
• NYTimes review: Great Soul: Mahatama Ghandi
• Books on Amazon