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Daniel Menaker
Dan then . . .
. . . and nowA Bio:After Nyack, I went to Swarthmore College, graduated in 1963, went to the Johns Hopkins University, where I got a Master's in English Literature, then taught for one year at a Quaker boarding school in Pennsylvania called the George School.
Then I moved to New York and taught at a boys' private school called Collegiate. In January of 1969, I started working at The New Yorker Magazine, as a fact checker, and stayed there until September of 1994, having been promoted to Editor, specializing in fiction, in 1976. In 1995, I joined Random House books as Senior Literary Editor, spent about five years here, went on to be an executive editor at HarperCollins publishers for 16 months, then returned to Random House as Editor-in-Chief in April of 2003. Last week I was promoted to the position of Executive Editor in Chief of the Random House Publishing Group, with editorial responsibility for three or four additional imprints.
As a writer I've had three books published--two books of stories and one novel, and I've also done reporting and essays and humor for almost every major magazine and newspaper in the country. In recent years I've written a lot about American folk, old-time, bluegrass, and country music.
As many Nyackers know, I'm sure, my brother, Mike, also a Nyack High graduate ('56) died in 1967 of septicemia after routine knee surgery. My father died in 1987 and my mother in 1994.
I married Katherine Bouton, who was at the time a colleague of mine at The New Yorker, in 1980, and we have two children, Will, 20, a junior at Skidmore, and Elizabeth, 17, a junior at the Friends School in Manhattan. Katherine is deputy editor of the New York Times Magazine (and regrets that she can't attend the reunion). I inherited my uncle's house in the Berkshires in the late 80s, and we go there often. My hobbies are nonexistent, because of my writing and job, but I do play the guitar just a little, work out, and go to concerts of many different kinds. We have a really horrible and malodorous dog named Pepper, and, allowing for the clichéd dismay about being of this age and the usual quandaries about the mysteries of existence and purpose, I'm pretty blessed and happy. [June 2004]
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Page last updated June 11, 2004