"He really did believe a good short story was the ultimate feature of a magazine, no matter what reader surveys showed."
Hills was known not only as a meticulous editor of short stories at Esquire, but also for his brilliance in excerpting novels for the magazine, including Styron's "Sophie's Choice" and Richard Ford's "Independence Day."
"He thought that that was the most skillful thing that he did," Ford told The Times on Friday. "Being able to excerpt bits from novels so that they'd resemble short stories was the height, in some ways, of the magazine editor's art."
Ford said Hills published "the first good short story I wrote" -- 'Rock Springs' in 1981 -- "and told me if I would write good short stories he would publish them. It was extremely encouraging to me. Esquire to me at the time was the place that you really wanted to publish fiction."
Hills "really loved to read, and his tastes were extremely wide," Ford said. "Being a fiction editor for a publisher or a magazine is a very difficult job. But Rust never got jaded ever in his life about reading fiction -- ever, ever. To his last breath, he saw the world through the optic of good fiction."
Among Hills' accomplishments at Esquire was conceiving a literary issue of the magazine in 1963 that included short stories, author interviews, a photo essay on writers' lives, a profile by Talese of the literary crowd involved with the Paris Review and a diagram of "The Structure of the American Literary Establishment."
Hills also commissioned Mailer to write the novel "An American Dream," which Hills edited and Esquire serialized.
"He retained until the end of his life really a passionate enthusiasm for new writers," Blythe said. "And not only that, once he had taken a shine to them, he would slip some impoverished writers little gifts of money. He once said to one, 'We don't want our writers going hungry.' And he'd do it in a very inconspicuous way. He put his money where his mouth was on that."
Talese recalled that, although he knew and worked with Hills in the 1960s, "he was not a man of the '60s. He was a guy who looked like he belonged to the '30s.
"He wore bow ties, and he didn't have a walking stick, but you imagined he'd be very comfortable with one. What he was, was an old-fashioned gentleman."
Blythe agreed, saying, "I always felt he was transplanted from another generation of editors." Hills "was a very charming, gracious guy," but "he also had a bite to him."
