One of the great fiction editors of the latter part of the 20th-century, Rust Hills, died this month at 83. Hills made his mark at Esquire; you can read an obituary at The Washington Post. Mention is made of a “wry” piece he wrote about “eating ice cream cones,” which I see originally appeared in The New Yorker in 1968.
Meanwhile, NPR just did a story on William Maxwell, the longtime fiction editor at The New Yorker and accomplished author in his own right, who died in 2000. You can listen in here, or track down John Updike’s eulogy in the Complete New Yorker.