Ted Solotaroff, 79; Literary Critic Started a Journal

Mr. Solotaroff's growing awareness of his friend's prodigious talent -- even as a graduate student -- extinguished his own long-nurtured aspirations to write fiction.

"The difference," he wrote in "First Loves," "wasn't a matter of mode or taste: it seemed simply, starkly, that of ability, like the difference between an actor who can play any role . . . and one who can't."

He received his master's degree from the University of Chicago in 1956 and began to build his own literary career, first at Commentary from 1960 to 1966 and then at his own magazine.

At Harper & Row, where he was senior editor from 1979 to 1991, he edited Russell Banks, Sue Miller, Robert Bly and other writers. Mr. Solotaroff worked with Bobbie Ann Mason on her first novel, "In Country" (1986).

Mason said it took her several months to realize that the novel she was contemplating was about Vietnam. "He encouraged me to confront the subject and not sidestep it," she said.

In 1989, when Rupert Murdoch bought Harper & Row, Mr. Solotaroff began to do less editing and more writing. He moved from Manhattan to East Quogue, a tranquil village on Long Island, and he plunged into rediscovering his early life.

He left the book business with a parting shot at what he labeled "the literary-industrial complex."

Book publishing, he wrote in a 1987 issue of the New Republic magazine, "has largely sold out its cultural purpose to a commercial one, thereby losing the vision and the energy and the realism that guided and empowered publishers like Knopf, Cerf . . . and others."

He found some satisfaction in the fact that his own pension tripled in value because the bidding war between Murdoch and fellow media magnate Robert Maxwell propelled the stock upward.

He was working on the third volume of his memoirs at the time of his death.

His marriages to Lynn Friedman, Shirley Fingerhood and Ghislaine Boulanger ended in divorce.

Survivors include his wife of 28 years, Virginia Heiserman Solotaroff of East Quogue; two sons from his first marriage, Paul Solotaroff of Boston and Ivan Solotaroff of Newtown, Pa.; a son from his second marriage, Jason Solotaroff of Montclair, N.J.; a son from his third marriage, Isaac Solotaroff of Brooklyn; five stepchildren, Regan Heiserman, Alison Heiserman and Arthur Heiserman, all of New York City, Lisa Heiserman of Cambridge, Mass., and Gina Heiserman of Woodstock, N.Y.; a brother; and 13 grandchildren.