JEAN STEIN

STEIN--Jean.

After an extraordinary life, our beloved, brave and beautiful mother Jean Stein died on Sunday, April 30, 2017. She was a writer, an editor, oral historian. Her 1956 interview with William Faulkner in The Paris Review, where she was an editor from 1956 to 1959, set a standard for the Review's interviews for decades to come. (In later years, Faulkner inscribed his book "The Fable" to her: "Generous and thoughtful as you are, Never afraid as you should be, Happy and fortunate, as you deserve to be.") For more than a decade, from 1989 to 2004, she published and edited one of the country's leading literary and visual arts magazines, Grand Street. The quarterly journal discovered the most brilliant voices and images of an emerging generation of writers and artists. It also published great writers, scientists and intellectuals: Lewis Thomas, Edward Said, Mike Davis, Norman Mailer, Joan Didion, Lydia Davis, William Vollman, Andrew Kopkind, Saul Steinberg, Terry Southern, William Eggleston, Fiona Shaw, Kenzaburo Oe, John Kenneth Galbraith, Ottessa Moshfegh, Hilton Als, John Waters and many more. Her 1970 book, "American Journey: The Times of Robert Kennedy" documented the funeral train, its characters, torment and pageantry. The book is turned to even today by scholars and journalists. Her "Edie: An American Biography" was a pathbreaking oral history-- an eclectic mix of direct testimonies, history and extraordinary tales. It found a great audience, especially among younger readers, and inspired a new generation of oral historians. It was a New York Times bestseller for months. (On both Edie and American Journey, George Plimpton was an invaluable collaborator.) Her last book, "West of Eden" was acclaimed in a front-page New York Times book review. The book, the review noted, created "something new, an oral-history-cum-autobiography." She was born in Chicago to Doris and Jules Stein. Her father Jules, who was an ophthalmologist before founding MCA, was the mastermind of Hollywood's business and byzantine halls. She was a product of that world--but, more important, she was an observant and astute chronicler of Hollywood's influence on America's past, present and future. Her interviews with Alice Roosevelt Longworth, Saul Steinberg, Alberto Giacometti, Cuban elites and revolutionaries, were published in a wide range of outlets. She apprenticed to Elia Kazan, from 1954-56, on the sets of "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof" and "Baby Doll." And later worked as a co-producer on, "What's Going On Here?," a 1963 satirical television series for Channel 5, directed by Jonathan Miller, which moved to the Ed Sullivan show. She had a talent for gathering the most interesting people - often a wild cross pollination of poets and politicians, musicians, troublemakers, journalists, whistleblowers, actors, writers and artists. She had a strong commitment to civil rights, and justice for the Palestinian people - quietly supporting various groups, publishing houses, media outlets and writers working to advance those issues. She was a board member of the Barenboim-Said Foundation. She was also a board member of Research to Prevent Blindness (a vision research organization founded by her father in 1960, widely credited with launching the NIH's National Eye Institute). She was a fundraiser for defendants in the Pentagon Papers trial; Co-Chair with Felicia Bernstein of the Committee to Reform Parole Laws of New York State; and a board member of the Martin Luther King Foundation. From 1976 to 2005, she was a board member of the Pompidou Foundation. Her kindness, gentleness, generosity of spirit, independent mind, intellectual curiosity, and her beguiling smile will be greatly missed by us, and by her many friends. Her influence on our country's cultural life was quiet, but clear and sure. She is survived by her daughters, Katrina and Wendy vanden Heuvel, and her granddaughters Nicola Cohen and Lila Coley. The funeral will be private; a Memorial celebration will be held in the Fall.