An Amazon Best Book of 2016

A celebration of the writing and editing life, as well as a look behind the scenes at some of the most influential magazines in America (and the writers who made them what they are).

You might not know Terry McDonell, but you certainly know his work. Among the magazines he has top-edited: Outside, Rolling Stone, Esquire, and Sports Illustrated. In this revealing memoir, McDonell talks about what really happens when editors and writers work with deadlines ticking (or drinks on the bar). His stories about the people and personalities he’s known are both heartbreaking and bitingly funny—playing “acid golf” with Hunter S. Thompson, practicing brinksmanship with David Carr and Steve Jobs, working the European fashion scene with Liz Tilberis, pitching TV pilots with Richard Price.

Here, too, is an expert’s practical advice on how to recruit—and keep—high-profile talent; what makes a compelling lede; how to grow online traffic that translates into dollars; and how, in whatever format, on whatever platform, a good editor really works, and what it takes to write well.

Taking us from the raucous days of New Journalism to today’s digital landscape, McDonell argues that the need for clear storytelling from trustworthy news sources has never been stronger. Says Jeffrey Eugenides: “Every time I run into Terry, I think how great it would be to have dinner with him. Hear about the writers he's known and edited over the years, what the magazine business was like back then, how it's changed and where it's going, inside info about Edward Abbey, Jim Harrison, Annie Proulx, old New York, and the Swimsuit issue. That dinner is this book.”

My Editor

There is nothing finer than deciding to write.

And if, like me, you were a young writer in the 1970s, there was almost too much to write about. Norman Mailer actually complained about this. Vietnam had a lot to do with it because friends had been there, or had gone and weren’t coming back. And there was The Movement, however you defined it, and the music and the drugs, and everyone drank and had sex with each other. No one wants to read any more about that, but there was a shocking inevitability to the way things were turning out.

Something else was always there too, just beneath the surface, no matter how uncomfortable or embarrassing it was to define. Writers talked about it, about writing and being writers. Ken Kesey said, “I’d rather be a lightning rod than a seismograph.” That’s the kind of writer we all wanted to be. What if writers were the story? What an idea.

Depending on how well you wrote and how often you changed jobs or assignments, other writers came in and out of your life. Some of them were already famous and others would be soon, but celebrity didn’t matter because you knew something together—the private thrill that comes from writing a clear and unique sentence. The craft of it. James Salter liked to “rub words in his hand, to turn them around and feel them.” Writing is exactly that, and there is no work like it because it is so complicated to know when you are done. Riffing about writing journalism, Renata Adler wrote, in her novel Speedboat, about giving “a piece of sugar to a raccoon, which in its odd fastidiousness would wash that sugar in a brook till there was nothing left.”

Editors can help with that.

Before I became an editor, I had an intuition about what readers wanted: they wanted to read whatever I wanted to write. Sure they did. I just needed a little editing sometimes. Every editor I ever had, including the bad ones, was strict about a piece living or dying by its language—even if they couldn’t write themselves, which of course they couldn’t. That’s why they were editors. Or so I thought until I met the editor who made me an editor.

His name was Bob Sherrill—the Other Bob Sherrill. He used the Other to distinguish himself from Robert Sherrill, the writer who had just published The Saturday Night Special, a book about handguns so smart that the Other Bob Sherrill said you just wanted to hold it up to your forehead. The Other Bob Sherrill was Robert Sherrill’s editor for a while, and he was my editor, too.

At forty-one, he was known in the magazine world to be crazy and shrewd and kind all at once. He was said to be especially good with young writers, and was also known for outdressing them in his white high-top Chuck Taylors with the fluorescent red laces (untied), his baggy blue-and-white seersucker suits and his black T-shirts, a green-and-pink silk bandanna around his neck and a Black Watch beret over his shaggy strawberry blond hair. Plus his Ray-Bans, rain or shine. Bob was colorful.

He was also a bit surreal, a flipped-out literary ice-cream man, but handsome too, and women liked him, and I worked for him as a reporter at a start-up weekly called LA that we were saying was like, you know, “the Village Voice, but for Los Angeles.” Bob never said that, though. He had come west on an “editorial whim” (his phrase) after some turbulent years in New York at Esquire, where he had been a sly packager and helped “midwife” (ditto) journalistic innovations from Dubious Achievements to that genre-cracking run of pieces that defined the New Journalism. Tom Wolfe, Gay Talese, Truman Capote, Mailer—every writer in the country knew the grow- ing roll call and wanted to be on it. Bob had edited many of them and liked to talk about how they got their story ideas.

“From editors, of course,” he would say, riding shotgun with a Mexican beer between his knees, motoring around Southern California with one or another of the young writers who worked for Bob had hired me thinking he was getting a solid wire service reporter, which I was not—although I had spent time in Beirut and Amman during the 1970 Jordanian civil war that became known as Black September and had been picked up by AP News features in New York. What I was, was ambitious and that’s what Bob said he liked about my story ideas—that, and that I had been reading Esquire since high school, was a little older than the other reporters, and had the best car.

Bob would never let you use eventful in a piece but this particular day was that for me, driving us both down the coast in my Fiat convert- ible to a party in Dana Point thrown by a former AP reporter named Pat McNulty, who had reinvented himself as the editor of Surfer mag- azine. I knew McNulty and the invitation had come through me. When I’d told Bob about it, I’d said there would be surfers for sure but also journalists, maybe a couple novelists, and also people in the new MFA program at U.C. Irvine, where McNulty was teaching. If there was a West Coast literary “scene” (a word Bob liked) to match up with Tom Wolfe’s recent piece on surf culture, “The Pump House Gang,” this would be it.

I knew Bob would be the center of the party as he always was wherever writers and alcohol came together. All the way down the Pacific Coast Highway we talked story ideas. Bob was warming up for the writers who would soon be circling for a chance to talk to him, all of them wanting to break trail for an assignment from Esquire, where he was still a contributing editor. Somewhere near Laguna Beach I said something about how anybody interested in journalism (like me) would want to read a piece by someone like Wolfe or Talese or Mailer or anyone good on Bob himself, and what was about to hap- pen to him at the party.

Bob had a way of cocking his head when he was enjoying whatever he was thinking. That’s what he did then, and told me he thought I thought like an editor and we should both think about that. Think about me becoming an editor. Think about making magazines.
“Think about monkeys jumping out of boxes,” he said. “That’s what good editors do.” I had not heard that one but figured he was talking about jack-in-the-box surprises. I nodded. He cocked his head again. I waited.
“Plus,” he said, taking another pull from his Tecate, “good editors never have to drive.”

Word Count (320)

Editing is about ideas, but it is mechanical, too. You have to get under the hood of the language, and editors use many tools. I’ll start by leaving the word counts at the top of my chapters because as an editor I always wanted to know how much I was about to read. This helped me evaluate pacing or the lack of it in a piece. Writers were sensitive to this once they found out how I worked, and were generally attuned to length, even if they weren’t being paid by the word.

At all the magazines I edited (Rolling Stone, Esquire, Sports Illustrated, et al.), feature stories were assigned at a specific length— usually four thousand words—and most writers would take that over five thousand and say they were close. Others would come in under three thousand and say the same thing. It was mysterious why being direct about the number of words they were filing was so difficult but I am sure it had more to do with alchemy than lack of discipline. Before Microsoft Word, stopping to count how many words you’d typed could be refreshing, like stopping to make tea or smoke a cigarette. Now doing a word count can have a slot machine kick to it if you have the discipline not to do it every time you hit Save.

None of this matters if the piece is good—and that’s determined by voice and narrative, not length. Going long is always more ambitious and usually more fun. This was true before lengthy pieces became “creative nonfiction” or “narrative journalism,” and it is true now that we’ve finally debunked the simple-minded Web assumption that no one will screen-read anything longer than a news capsule. No writer I ever edited wanted to go short, anyway. Neither do I, but I also know that the best pieces seem to find their own length. That’s the alchemy.

Jim Harrison (525)

The first chapter of Jim Harrison’s first novel, Wolf, begins with a two-page sentence. He says it was vanity, that he wanted to show it could be done because he was a young writer and hungry.

That was in 1971. A few years later when I was starting to work with him, I asked if his editor had tried to do something with that first sentence.

“Of course,” he said wearily, as if in my tragic inexperience I was unable to grasp the basic construct of editing him. Jim did little revising and was proud of it. Rewriting was for people who hadn’t worked everything out early—not for Jim, who insisted that he always thought things through before he wrote anything down. As for edi- tors, why should he let them fool with his choices? They were not, as he had explained to me when we first met, writers. He also liked to note that he was a poet and “editors don’t change poems.”

“I wouldn’t change any of your poems either,” I said, but when it came to his journalism I wasn’t so sure. Being above editing was a pose some writers found situationally useful, the way some children are “allergic” to lima beans. It was the foot Jim liked to get off on and, sure enough, we tangled over copy our first time around. I was at Outside magazine and suggested that his lede on a story about Key West was really the second paragraph and the first paragraph should be the kicker at the end of the piece. He hung up on me.

I got an immediate follow-up call from his agent, Bob Datilla, a tough, reasonable guy.

“You want to pull the piece?” I asked, after his declension of my shortcomings.

“Of course not,” Datilla said. “We just want to be on the record about what a dumb shit you are.” (Pause.) “But Jim can be difficult, too.”

“So we’ll all think about it?” I said.
“Exactly.”

I’m not sure how much we all thought about it, but I switched the paragraphs to what I’d suggested and we never discussed the piece again. Maybe Jim didn’t notice. But I learned to tread lightly or risk being told, as I once was by him, “You lynched my baby.” His raw copy was so ambitious that I usually just checked the copy edit and wrote the headline. We talked about other things, like what we were having for dinner, as well as what we were reading. My working relationship with Jim and other writers, my growing friendships with them, was nourished by even the mundane details of their lives.

In Wolf, Jim wrote, Perhaps I’ll never see a wolf. And I don’t offer this little problem as central to anyone but myself. Fair enough. As a reader, I took that as a glance at a private mystery. As an editor, I wanted that wolf to be my problem, too. I wanted to ride along. I hoped that was how I could become a good editor, by editing great writers and getting to know them. The ancient Greeks had a word for this: hubris.

−ENDIT−

From the book THE ACCIDENTAL LIFE by Terry McDonell, copyright 2016 by Terry McDonell. Published by arrangement with Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of The Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC.

“Intelligent, entertaining, and chivalrous . . . McDonell, founding editor of Outside magazine in 1977, has had tenures at or near the top of Rolling Stone, Newsweek, Esquire and Sports Illustrated. Slashing costs and watching serious writers take buyouts felt [to him] ‘like a great library was burning down.’ But The Accidental Life is a fond book. It’s a fan’s notes from a man who, before the apocalypse, edited and often befriended many of his literary heroes . . . He played touch football and ate oysters with James Salter; golfed while on LSD with Hunter S. Thompson and George Plimpton; canoed and drank with Peter Matthiessen; and helped explode an uptight dinner party alongside Edward Abbey . . . McDonell’s insistence on keeping the focus on his writers rather than himself has a humble appeal—this memoir is far from self-congratulatory. He writes winningly about his regrets [and] evokes the magazine-world heyday of lavish offices, drinks carts in the evening and expense-account hedonism. Some of the details will make freelance writers scream (I screamed, and I rarely write freelance any longer.) The Accidental Life is a savvy fax from a dean of the old school.” —Dwight Garner, The New York Times

“In his long career as an editor, McDonell has worked with eminent, colorful writers. His new memoir is full of fond anecdotes about literary friends, and more. He also provides a kind of primer for aspiring editors.” –John Williams, The New York Times Book Review

“If you dig New Journalism, Ed Abbey, fiction, nonfiction, Western writers and their New York editors, and the good old days of Elaine’s, you will eat up McDonell’s memoir/literary history. Damn, that sounded like fun.” —ELLE Magazine

“Revelatory, poignant . . . instructional. The Accidental Life is one man’s manly writer stories; a writing guide—a young (or old) writer could learn a lot from the advice McDonell has gleaned [and] from his own crisp, thoughtful sentences; a eulogy for the magazine business of yore; and an engaging, soulful tribute to stories of all kinds and the quirky, complicated people who craft them. ‘There is nothing finer than deciding to write,’ McDonell begins [his book]. Anyone who agrees with that sentiment will want to read everything that follows.” —Michael Merschel, The Dallas Morning News

“Informative, inspiring, often surprising; rich in anecdotes . . . McDonell made the masthead at major publications, shaping his own stories and those of other writers from the 1970s through the early years of this century . . . By the lesson of his own style—his tight, flowing sentences—he shows how to put words on paper. It’s with author profiles that McDonell’s book acquires value: an essay on Elaine’s may amuse would-be diners who couldn’t get a table when Frank Sinatra could. Other profiles are more contemporary, including insightful takes on novelists Richard Price and Richard Ford and a painful recollection of troubled media guru David Carr. Observations on money, writer’s block and letters to the editor: editing success is all in the mix, and the mix McDonell achieves is just so. He holds off until the end of his book to explain its title. Redemption in work, he reflects, kept life steady against the accidental when ‘friends faded. Life failed.’ McDonell’s best pieces capture the accidental when they take unexpected turns that lend his writing insight and humanity.” —Gerald Bartell, San Francisco Chronicle

“An insider’s view of the magazine industry, from its apex in the ’70s to the rise of the Internet and online content and decline of print journalism—by a man who was present to witness these titanic shifts. McDonell offers stories of luminaries of various stripes, including George Plimpton, Hunter S. Thompson, Steve Jobs, a cigar-smoking and mostly silent Arnold Schwarznegger, and Margot Kidder . . . As with many editors, McDonell effaces a large part of himself in [the book]; his invisibility allows these writers, subjects, friends, and bosses to shine more brightly. He offers nuance and depth.” —Erin Gianni, PopMatters

“In a series of sharp vignettes, McDonell takes readers behind the scenes of the publishing world to reveal the humorous and at times difficult relationships between writers and their editors.” —Poets & Writers

* “As a former top-of-the-masthead editor at Outside, Rolling Stone, Esquire, and Sports Illustrated, McDonell has been there and done that over four decades of dramatic change in the magazine business. Along the way, he’s edited and drunk with a who’s who of American writers. Naturally, he has stories to tell, and he tells plenty of them in this unfailingly fascinating look at that point where publishing, literature, and celebrity meet . . . This is the perfect example of blending showstoppers with perceptive appreciations of the work of McDonell’s favorite writers, and fascinating snippets on the craft of editing. Expect this book to find a home on the desks of just about everyone who has anything to do with magazine publishing (or who likes to read about hanging out at Elaine’s with famous writers).” —Bill Ott, Booklist (starred review)

“Writers can take on a mythic quality: solitary figures who conjure imaginary worlds and see more than the rest of us. In this memoir, some of the most colorful literary titans to ever walk this earth indeed live up to their legends. But the gold in McDonell’s book is the lessons he took from these writers, beyond the bravado and antics that often characterized their work, about how to perceive the world.” —Nate Hopper, TIME

“Fascinating. . . Equal parts memoir and manual, McDonell embeds advice and insight within the absorbing anecdotes that have punctuated his career. His recollections—broken into succinct, themed essays—provide a window into the lives of the writers he has edited. Best of all for us writers reading along, these looks behind the scenes are sewn together with reflections on topics as wide-ranging as his formula for a foolproof feature pitch and his experience building the first tablet magazine at Sports Illustrated.” —Tyler Moss, Writer’s Digest

“Terrific . . . McDonell’s new book conveys the ups, downs, glamour, fun, excitement, and miseries of a magazine journalism career that saw him collaborate with some of the most prominent names in modern American fiction and nonfiction.” —Alex Heard, Outside

“McDonell documents the long, strange trip through the golden age of journalism that has been his career, [which] began when the publishing industry was booming creatively and financially, and flourished during the sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll of the seventies through mid-nineties. Funny and unsettling by turns, The Accidental Life offers sharp insight into that time.” Alex Belth, Esquire.com

“[A] must-read. With a cast of characters including Hunter S. Thompson, David Carr, Steve Jobs and former BAZAAR editor in chief Liz Tilberis, McDonell's memoir is an inside look into the inner workings of a career devoted to some of the most beloved glossy mags.” —Sarah Bracy Penn, Harpersbazaar.com, “13 Books for Your Back-to-School Reading List”

“Ranging from drug-enhanced adventures with Hunter S. Thompson and George Plimpton at the Aspen Golf Club to observations that click-bait is nothing more than the old game of newsstand pandering refashioned for the digital age, the best of the essays have the mic-drop profundity of a Renata Adler sequence, or bristle with the glamour gazing of a gossip column. But for the writers reading it, the stories are also freighted with the reassurance that struggles—financial, critical, personal—that cut so close to the individual are universal. To be perched atop America’s top magazines over the last half-century was to be simultaneously immersed in many of the nation’s most important cultural movements.” —Bryce Bauer, Signature

“Compulsively readable.” —Jeff Simon, The Buffalo News, Editor’s Choice

“McDonell’s career in American magazines involved friendships and collaborations with some of the foremost cultural figures of postwar America, from novelist Richard Ford to actress Margot Kidder. The number of magazines at which he served in the past four decades is astonishing, and [in The Accidental Life], he runs his fingers along the fine grains of the editing life. McDonell [did] pretty much everything one could have hoped to in the magazine world of late 20th-century America. He edited and befriended the alpha males of a muscular brand of journalism that flowed from the American West to midtown Manhattan. He was also chummy with Helen Gurley Brown, the legendary editor of Cosmopolitan, who took the bus down Central Park West to her office, in order to stay in touch with her readers. He hung out with the crime novelist Richard Price, rafted down the Salmon River in Idaho with Rolling Stone founder Jann Wenner, and frequented the literary clubhouse that was Elaine’s restaurant on the Upper East Side. Seemingly every writer floats through these pages: Jim Harrison, Thomas McGuane, Susan Orlean and, most surprisingly of all, Jimmy Buffett, who wrote for McDonell at Outside and Sports Illustrated, composing a song for the latter’s swimsuit issue . . . McDonell acknowledges mistakes, as well as the shortcomings of the magazine industry: he also points out that few women are the top editors; people of color remain all too rare on the mastheads. [But] McDonell displays an optimism rare for his industry. ‘Editors,’ he writes, ‘have to be optimistic, ever hopeful that the next issue will come together not quite as badly as the last one.’” —Alexander Nazaryan, Newsweek

“Eloquent. . . direct and crisp, with a touch of tartness. McDonell [is] as fine a magazine editor as I have known. By his count, he has worked at 13 magazines, most of them as top editor, and he shrewdly organizes his book as a collection of vignettes, each one with its word count noted at the top, since when he edited stories he liked to know how long his pencil had to travel. Extraordinary moments [are] laid out nimbly in his memoir. At magazines like Outside, Rolling Stone and Esquire, he could persuade novelists to commit journalism, usually at length, and sometimes with the journey and not the destination as the point . . . He has all the stories, and tells them with a subtle tension, never succumbing to the easy laugh. McDonell can be sentimental, especially about friends now dead, but he is never mawkish. There is not a bloated or sappy passage in the book.” —Jim Kelly, The Wall Street Journal

“A great magazine editor is a Diaghilev commanding an executive desk, a miniature aircraft carrier from which ideas launch into the wild yonder . . . Long-haulers are often the founders of publications that they infused with their personalities, ambitions, and pioneer spirit . . . A book devoted to the craft, rigor, career highs, and sudden pressure drops of being big chief, Terry McDonell’s memoir is instructive, entertaining, and briskly told . . . He has had a peripatetic journey, with stays at Rolling Stone, Us Weekly, Esquire, Men’s Journal, Sports Afield, and Sports Illustrated, adapting to each new vessel while letting the distinctive voices of his writers venture across the page . . . As befits the former editor of Esquire, Men’s Journal, and similar sensitive-dude salons, McDonell dwells in a musky, masculine sphere, and devotes many of the chapters to friendships and interludes with guys’ guys such as Tom McGuane, Jim Harrison, Richard Ford, Richard Price, James Salter, and Hunter S. Thompson: portraits that are generous, perceptive about the fluctuations of fame and fortitude, occasionally eulogistic. The twilight melancholy that creeps through is due not only to the ghosts of those now gone—Salter, George Plimpton, as well as Liz Tilberis, the gallant editor of Harper’s Bazaar, and Elaine Kaufman, whose Elaine’s was the watering hole of choice for accomplished menfolk playing hooky from spouses and deadlines—but also to the waning of an entire way of life, the shrinking power, prestige, glamour, and advertising clout of glossy print in the Digital Age beneath Silicon Valley hegemony and the loss of journalistic comradeship. Everything McDonell writes rings true, but the marvel is (as I’m sure he’d agree) that so much superb, adventurous work is still being done in magazines in the encroaching void of such adversity. If you’re going to go down with the ship, might as well go down swinging.” —James Wolcott, Vanity Fair

“Engaging, captivating—thoroughly entertaining. ‘Editors work without applause,’ writes McDonell. For some 40 years, he worked at a slew of America’s top magazines, where he shepherded the work of many of our finest writers. The job required much more than a talent for shaping a good lede (which McDonell clearly has). It demanded equal parts diplomacy, ego-stroking, discretion and good-natured patience. But the reward was lasting friendships with some of the most talented, if idiosyncratic, people who ever fashioned words into unforgettable stories. The list of friends is a virtual who’s who of the crowning era of magazine journalism . . . The Accidental Life comprises short chapters that recall his working friendships through colorful anecdotes of time spent together, be it drinking in New York, pitching Hollywood studios, or fishing in Montana. These stories are laced with insights. McDonell’s enthusiasm for his life’s work percolates on nearly every page. [This is] one of those surprising books that at first glance seem specialized, but soon prove to be all-embracing. Where else can you have close encounters with Steve Jobs, Jimmy Buffett, and Kurt Vonnegut? McDonell’s life has been a series of such encounters, and he shares them with the inquisitiveness and magnanimity that clearly served him so well as an editor.” —Robert Weibezahl, Bookpage

“Legendary editor McDonell has lately found himself in the digital realm, having cofounded LitHub, but he’s served as editor at over a dozen magazines. His memoir is advertised on the strength of its wild side, but it is most attractive for its hard-earned wisdom on the art of storytelling.” —Michael LaPointe, Times Literary Supplement

“Terry McDonell has long been one of the pre-eminent editors in the world of popular magazines, but here he is the ring-master for a world of literary masters, irresistible eccentrics, big ego owners and gotcha newsstand covers. Step right up and into a world we seldom see from the inside out.” —Tom Brokaw

“McDonell has led the beau ideal of the editor’s life. And he’s got it down on paper. In both cases, he has done it better than anyone anywhere.” —Graydon Carter, Editor, Vanity Fair

“Legendary editor Terry McDonell writes beautifully on the subject of what he’s learned about writing, and life, from some of the best, most colorful and most difficult writers of his generation. Those of us who worked with him would tend to agree he taught us a thing or two; although he’s still wrong about semicolons.” —Jay McInerney

“In his many far-roaming years as an editor, Terry McDonell has worked with some of America’s most gifted—and gonzo—writers. From George Plimpton to Ed Abbey to Hunter S. Thompson, they all make raucous appearances in this terrific, free-wheeling memoir. It’s a must-read for anybody who is curious about the wild and talented characters who shaped the literature of our times.” —Carl Hiaasen

“Great editors are the rarest of literary and journalistic jewels: if a writer or reporter is lucky enough to find one, a magical collaboration—and inviolate friendship—take form. Terry McDonell has conjured as much magic as any magazine editor of his time, at great magazines and with great writers, from Peter Matthiessen to Hunter Thompson. This editor’s notes are both a wonderful primer and tell a remarkable tale.” —Carl Bernstein

“Every time I run into Terry McDonell, I think how great it would be to have dinner with him. Hear about the writers he's known and edited over the years, what the magazine business was like back then, how it's changed and where it's going, inside info about Edward Abbey, Jim Harrison, Annie Proulx, old New York, and the Swimsuit issue. That dinner is this book.” —Jeffrey Eugenides

“Terry McDonell knew the wildest writers, edited most of them, and he remembers. A great read.” —Roy Blount, Jr.

“Legendary editor McDonell's account of dealings with great writers is catnip for anyone in the magazine business. Publishing gossip of the highest order from an unimpeachable source. It made me drunk and giddy to have such access. While I was reading The Accidental Life, I panicked whenever I couldn't lay my hands on it.” —Mary Norris, author of Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen

“Terry McDonell is a brilliant editor and a dangerous thinker—which is the same thing. It’s all there in The Accidental Life.” —Susan Casey, author of The Wave and The Devil’s Teeth

“A brilliant, behind-the-scenes account of some of the best storytellers of the last three decades, written by their editor who also knew them as friends. Terry McDonell writes with swagger, a poetic sense of wonder, and a gorgeously hungover soul.” —Bill Buford

“Funny, wise and down to earth, Terry McDonell has lived brilliantly in letters, always in the world but never far from the page. The Accidental Life is a glorious book, an affectionate and knowing tour of contemporary literature and journalism, full of essential insight into editing, writing, and living on one’s own terms.” —Steve Coll, Dean, Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University, and author of Ghost Wars

“There is credit claimed for choices made and chances taken, but not a hint of self-congratulation. There are accounts of evenings spent with well-known people (with many of them laid to rest), but no name-dropping. The Accidental Life is a detailed and plain-spoken book about work.” —Greil Marcus

“I worked for Terry McDonell for six years, a wild ride that felt a lot like reading this book—inspiring, intoxicating, and just a little dangerous. If The Accidental Life doesn’t make you want to be an editor, nothing will.” —Sid Evans, Editor in Chief, Southern Living

“Terry McDonell is a rare example of a fine editor who is also an excellent writer. What he does in The Accidental Life is connect us to brilliant people, known not only for what they write but for how they lived their lives. He does this with heart, in a sometimes heartless profession. And he loves what he does.” —Gay Talese

“It reads like A Moveable Feast for the second half of the twentieth century, unfolding from L.A. to Manhattan, Montana to Aspen. All the bad boys are at large: Hunter, McGuane, Buffett, Jann, Plimpton. Yes, a lot of ‘sex, drugs and rock and roll’ went down. But McDonell always brings it back to the writers and the writing—which, by the way, he does as well as any of them.” —John Huey, former Editor in Chief, Time Inc.

“Somehow, Terry McDonell has managed to pour his rich and singular career into a book equally rich, equally singular, and always a pleasure. I enjoyed it greatly.” —Daniel Okrent, author of Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition, and first Public Editor of The New York Times

“Terry McDonell's masterpiece is the book of the year for those who revere literary memoirs. Who knew the ‘editor's editor’ was also a brilliant writer? His zesty portraits of wild men and mandarins—of Hunter Thompson, Jim Harrison and George Plimpton, and a host of the good, the bad and the beautiful—give luminous life to the magazine world's epic era.” —Shelby Coffey, Vice Chairman, Newseum

“Terry McDonell is a perfect storm: He knows every great non-fiction writer of the latter half of the 20th century and, luckily for us, writes about them with such wit and aplomb. I learned a lot about these folks, but even more about what makes great writing and great editing, from a master at both. This book is a must-read for anyone who loves to read about writers and writing.” —Josh Quittner, Editorial Director, Flipboard

“The Accidental Life is a brilliant piece of work, written in a very clear and compelling style, imaginatively structured, with a wonderful sense of humor. Any writer or editor (or anyone interested in writing and reading) will find McDonell’s book not only a must read but also an extremely entertaining and informative one.” —Don Carleton, Executive Director and J. R. Parten Chair in the Archives of American History, University of Texas at Austin

“Fascinating . . . engrossing. Part memoir, part retrospective, veteran publishing executive McDonell has produced an account of 20th-century publishing, journalism, writing, and authors from the perspective of one thoroughly entrenched in the culture and increasingly variable climate of the profession. The Accidental Life provides a glimpse into the people, places, and personalities of the magazine industry, as well as tidbits and lessons learned from McDonell’s colleagues and friends. Stories build upon one another, flowing into a narrative that reads as easily as fiction, while retaining a journalistic quality (be true to your sources; let others know where one stands). McDonell’s account charts a trajectory that follows the rise and major voices in American composition and journalism, as well as the seemingly inevitable challenge of keeping pace with the changing landscape of news and media. Will engage readers of popular culture studies, journalism and the lives of literary figures.” —Gricel Dominguez, Library Journal

“Long before he became a pioneer in digital media at Time Inc., Terry McDonell was already a heroic figure in the business of print magazines. He worked on the start-up of Outside and invented Smart; commuted between Livingston, Montana, and New York; served as managing editor at Rolling Stone; and was editor in chief of Us, Esquire, Men’s Journal, Sports Afield, and Sports Illustrated. Through effortless writing and pin-sharp recollections from the past 40-odd years, this book is an amazing look on all that. McDonell worked with the best of them—Tom McGuane, George Plimpton, Tim Cahill—played ‘acid golf’ with Hunter S. Thompson, and even wrote a column for Liz Tilberis at Harper’s Bazaar before that most beloved of all fashion editors died. I mention the latter because Terry is seemingly one tough, macho journalist-editor whose tastes run from hand-tooled cowboy boots to The Paris Review (he’s president of its board of directors) to Chateau Lafite. The truth is, he’s one of the most generous, sensitive, literary guys out there, who did what he did extremely well and isn’t averse to sharing the details.” —Richard David Story, Departures

“McDonell taps into his nearly four decades in magazine journalism at such well-known titles as Esquire, LA magazine, Men’s Journal, Newsweek, Outside, Rolling Stone, as well as Sports Illustrated. The magazines he edited have garnered numerous accolades, including six National Magazine Awards (the Oscars of magazine journalism). The Accidental Life is a kind of memorial to mentors, heroes, colleagues, and friends, as well as some of the last century’s best and most important writers, including Tom McGuane and Richard Ford. It’s a bittersweet tribute to the golden age of new journalism (and its paler descendants), and a guidebook to a craft that has become increasingly devalued. It’s also the story of McDonell’s own lucky life . . . He celebrates colleagues and friends—their talents and passions; he delights in their friendship and their cocaine- and alcohol-infused adventures; he glorifies the macho angst (‘whatever that is,’ he writes) of their brotherhood . . . McDonell’s passion for ideas is what makes him such a smart editor . . . A wild, high-octane memorable ride.” —Carrie Tuhy, Publishers Weekly

“The former editor of Rolling Stone, Esquire, and Sports Illustrated looks back and celebrates after 40 years as journalist, editor, and magazine founder. [Here are] acerbic commentaries on the media, tender remembrances of friends and colleagues, and cogent advice to editors and writers. Sharp profiles feature ‘vaguely menacing’ Hunter S. Thompson, moody Kurt Vonnegut, elegant Paris Review editor George Plimpton, and ‘princely and brooding’ Steve Jobs . . . Among the most moving pieces are homages to friends, including irreverent Harper's Bazaar editor Elizabeth Tilberis; novelist James Salter; and Peter Matthiessen . . . McDonell loved editing, which, he says, is ‘never only about the words’ but also images, typography, display copy, and ‘polish and nuance.’ He admires precision, and admonishes reporters: ‘Check your sources.’ McDonell, who founded LitHub, does not bemoan digital media, but he regrets that ‘digital content’ meetings rarely focus on the quality of journalism. A wide-ranging, smart, and witty collection testifying to an impressive career.” —Kirkus Reviews

“Early on in this engaging memoir, McDonell jokingly defines hubris as his hope, when starting out, that ‘I could become a great editor, by editing great writers and getting to know them.’ As this book’s short, anecdote-rich chapters show, hope became reality during a career that included stints at Sports Illustrated, Rolling Stone, and Newsweek. McDonell covers the nuts and bolts of getting weekly and monthly magazines out, and the transition from print to digital media; these sections have the same verve that energizes his profiles of people whose talents he tapped, including Tom McGuane, Peter Matthiessen, Jim Harrison, Richard Price, and Richard Ford. His prose zings with witty insights . . . He also writes with great warmth about former colleagues. This book will fascinate anyone interested in what goes on behind the scenes in publishing.” —Publishers Weekly

TERRY McDONELL has won numerous awards for his editorial work at various magazines and websites. He is also a novelist and poet, and has written and produced for film and television. In 2012 he was inducted into the American Society of Magazine Editors’ Hall of Fame. He is the president of the board of the Paris Review Foundation and serves on the Board of Overseers of the Columbia Journalism Review. He lives in New York City. View titles by Terry McDonell