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Barbara Epstein, who co-founded the prestigious New York Review of Books, has died of lung cancer at the age of 76, the magazine announced on its website.
Epstein, who died Friday, launched the New York Review together with Robert Silvers and three other friends in the middle of a publishing strike in 1963.
By publishing in the first edition original essays by literary giants Mary McCarthy, W.H. Auden, Robert Penn Warren, Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal, the New York Review immediately became an indispensable part of American literature.
Epstein and Silvers edited the weekly tabloid-format publication, which carried a mix of book reviews, cultural criticism and original reporting.
"She was a guiding spirit of the paper," Silvers said in a statement on the website.
"She brought to bear on all the work of the Review a superb intelligence, an exquisite sense of language and a strong moral and political concern to expose and remedy injustice.
"Gallant, imaginative, original, affectionate, she edited and published the work of many of the most talented writers and scholars of our time, many of whom became her close friends. She largely created The New York Review of Books and what it stands for," Silvers said.
Epstein was born Barbara Zimmerman in Boston, Massachusetts in 1929 and graduated from Radcliffe University. Early in her career, she was responsible for convincing Doubleday to publish "The Diary of Anne Frank" and became the editor of the book.
She was married for years to top New York publisher Jason Epstein, with whom she had two children before divorcing in the 1980s.
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AFP 171651 GMT 06 06
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