L. Rust Hills, 83; Esquire's fiction editor published best American authors
L. Rust Hills, the former longtime fiction editor at Esquire who was known for publishing the work of the best American writers during his 30 years at the magazine, has died. He was 83.
Hills, a resident of Key West, Fla., died of cardiac arrest Tuesday after collapsing during a visit to Belfast, Maine, said his wife of 34 years, author Joy Williams.
"Over the course of five decades, he was one of, if not the, greatest fiction editors in magazines," Will Blythe, a former literary editor at Esquire who worked with Hills for 10 years beginning in the late '80s, told The Times on Friday.
Hills began working at Esquire as fiction editor in 1957. He left in 1964 to become fiction editor at the Saturday Evening Post and returned to Esquire for an 11-month stint beginning in 1969.
Returning to Esquire again in 1977, he remained at the magazine until 1999.
Writer Gay Talese, who knew Hills at Esquire in the '60s and had some of his nonfiction pieces edited by Hills, described him as "a man who cared greatly about stature and status in the world of fiction."
"He wasn't interested in commercial fiction," Talese told The Times. "He was interested in the standards of serious literature, and he tried to, in a commercial magazine, impose upon its pages some of the lofty notions he had about the written word."
During Hills' years as fiction editor at Esquire, the magazine published the work of literary heavyweights such as Philip Roth, John Cheever, Norman Mailer, William Styron, Raymond Carver, Don DeLillo, Bruce Jay Friedman, E. Annie Proulx and Ann Beattie.
"He basically was, from the beginning, a champion of literary fiction," Blythe said. "Not gimmick fiction, not slick fiction -- literary fiction.
"When Arnold Gingrich started Esquire back in the '30s, the magazine published some very good writers such as [Ernest] Hemingway and [F. Scott] Fitzgerald, but by the time Rust arrived [in 1957] I think it was publishing fiction that was nowhere near as good, at least on a consistent basis, as what Rust was about to bring to the magazine," Blythe said.
Hills, Blythe said, "believed in fiction as, I think, the ultimate creative expression.
"I once saw him tell an editor in chief of the magazine that he could show him exactly why a story was superb. And at that moment, he was waving at the editor a heavily annotated manuscript that was full of what looked like equations and all sorts of markings. He had spent a lot of time marking it up so he could show exactly why it was a superb piece of work that deserved to be in the magazine, and he was waving it like a battle flag.
