Clay Felker - Career

Career

After graduation, Felker worked as a sportswriter for Life Magazine. He turned an article he wrote about Casey Stengel into a 1961 book, Casey Stengel's Secret. He was on the development team for Sports Illustrated and was features editor for Esquire. He later worked for TIME.

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. Her 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. She joined the founding staff of Felker's New York and became politically active in the feminist movement. Felker funded the first issue of Ms. Magazine.

After losing a battle for Esquire editorship to Harold Hayes, Felker left to join The New York Herald Tribune in 1962. He revamped a Sunday section into New York and hired writers such as Tom Wolfe and Jimmy Breslin; the section became the "hottest Sunday read in town."

A long-time friend of Tom Wolfe, Felker was one of the early proponents of New Journalism and key to its emergence. After founding New York Magazine in 1968, one of his first features was Wolfe's coverage of Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters, a story Wolfe later expanded into his non-fiction novel The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. New York became one of the most imitated magazines of its time, both from a design perspective and in the way it combined service and life-style articles. "He had the crass but revolutionary (revolutionary in the sense that it overthrew generations of class conceits) notion that you are what you buy. He sniffed the great consumer revolution with its social, political, and aesthetic implications. And New York Magazine became the first magazine to spell out where to get the goods (and at the best price)," wrote Michael Wolff about Felker in New York's 35th Anniversary issue.

Felker became editor-in-chief and publisher of The Village Voice in 1974 and resigned from New York following its hostile takeover by Rupert Murdoch in 1976. He then bought Esquire in 1977 but sold it in 1979.

In 1994, Felker became a lecturer at the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley, teaching a course called "How to Make a Magazine" at the Felker Magazine Center, named in his honor and of which he became director.