Ted Solotaroff, 79; Literary Critic Started a Journal

Ted Solotaroff, 79, a writer, critic and editor who founded New American Review, an influential literary journal in the 1960s and 1970s, and who helped shape the works of prominent writers while at Harper & Row publishers, died Aug. 8 at his home in East Quogue, N.Y., of complications from pneumonia.

A "man of letters" in the tradition of Edmund Wilson, Alfred Kazin and Lionel Trilling, Mr. Solotaroff was "one of the last of the great editors," said novelist and short-story writer Bobbie Ann Mason.

Mr. Solotaroff was an editor and critic at the opinion journal Commentary before starting New American Review in 1967. The paperback literary journal, later called American Review, published E.L. Doctorow, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, William H. Gass and Donald Barthelme, among others. He also ran an early excerpt from what became Philip Roth's novel "Portnoy's Complaint."

"Ted Solotaroff's taste in fiction has proved to be something of a national resource," author John Romano wrote in a 1978 issue of the New York Times Book Review, shortly before American Review ceased publication.

"It was the great regret of his life that he didn't push harder to keep it going," said his son Paul Solotaroff. He said Bantam, which funded the magazine, "was pushing hard to shut it down. It wasn't bringing in the novels that would grow out of these pieces being published in the journal."

Mr. Solotaroff produced two volumes of critical essays before writing about his own life in two well-received books.

"Truth Comes in Blows" (1998) tells the story of his childhood in Depression-era New Jersey and his troubled relationship with a cold, demanding father. A second volume, "First Loves" (2004), picks up the story in the late 1940s. The title alludes to two loves in Mr. Solotaroff's life: one romantic, the other literary.

Theodore Solotaroff was born Oct. 9, 1928, into a working-class Jewish family in Elizabeth, N.J. His father, the owner of Ben's Standard Plate Glass Co., was a difficult man who represented, as Mr. Solotaroff wrote, "that sort of driving energy that established the Jewish middle class."

His father was also cruel and vindictive, he wrote. At 5, Ted Solotaroff fell off a swing and broke his nose, but his father refused to take him to a doctor. The youngster suffered with "the patch of ugliness" that was his nose -- until at 18, he borrowed money from an aunt to have the nose reset.

His mother, gentle and artistic, often bore the brunt of her husband's rage and bitterness, and Ted Solotaroff often felt compelled to protect her. He also helped out after school in his father's shop. He hated the work.

The family escaped Elizabeth and moved to suburban Elmora, N.J., where Mr. Solotaroff's love of sports, particularly baseball, began to morph into competition of a different sort. "In the league I played in now -- the Jewish one -- the high scoring was in English, math, social studies and science," he wrote in "Truth Comes in Blows."

As a University of Michigan freshman, the first story he ever wrote won a campus fiction prize. He received his undergraduate degree in 1952 and then became a graduate student at the University of Chicago, where he befriended aspiring novelist Philip Roth, also a New Jersey native with Jewish working-class roots.