William Whitworth, who wrote revealing profiles in The New Yorker giving voice to his idiomatic subjects and polished the prose of some of the nation’s celebrated writers as its associate editor before transplanting that magazine’s painstaking standards to The Atlantic, where he was editor in chief for 20 years, died on Friday, March 8, in Conway, Arkansas, near Little Rock. He was 87.
His daughter, Katherine Whitworth Stewart, announced the death. She said he was being treated after several falls and operations in a hospital.
As a young college graduate, Mr. Whitworth forsook a promising career as a jazz trumpeter to do a different kind of improvisation as a journalist.
