Russell Lynes

Russell Lynes (Joseph Russell Lynes, Jr.) December 2, 1910 – September 14, 1991) was an American art historian, photographer, author and managing editor of Harper's Magazine.

Born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, Lynes was the younger son of Adelaide (Sparkman) and Joseph Russell Lynes. His older brother was the photographer George Platt Lynes.

He graduated from Yale in 1932 and married Mildred Akin, a Vassar graduate, in 1934. He started as a clerk at Harper & Brothers, the publishing house, from 1932 to 1936 and was director of publications at Vassar in 1936 and 1937. He then took a job at the Shipley School in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, where he was assistant principal from 1937 to 1940, then principal until 1944. He then joined Harper's Magazine as an assistant editor and became managing editor in 1947, a position he would hold for the next twenty years.

He died in New York City at Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center.

Read more about Russell Lynes:  Bibliography

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    A lady is nothing very specific. One man’s lady is another man’s woman; sometimes, one man’s lady is another man’s wife. Definitions overlap but they almost never coincide.
    Russell Lynes (b. 1910)

    “There is Lowell, who’s striving Parnassus to climb
    With a whole bale of isms tied together with rhyme,
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    The only gracious way to accept an insult is to ignore it; if you can’t ignore it, top it; if you can’t top it, laugh at it; if you can’t laugh at it, it’s probably deserved.
    —Russell Lynes (b. 1910)