In the 50th anniversary issue of The Paris Review, Grand Street editor Ben Sonnenberg describes the literary magazine as a publishing endeavor continually at the mercy of money. What was the darkest moment of Grand Street? “When we ran out of money.” What is needed to keep a literary magazine alive? “Someone else’s money.” And he was that someone else.

The son of a wealthy New York publicist, Sonnenberg was the rare literary magazine publisher whose worries were not typically financial. Sonnenberg famously diagnosed himself with multiple sclerosis at the age of 34, and yet this didn’t seem to in any way hinder his literary ambitions. Besides authoring the touching memoir Lost Property (“I am a Collector’s Child. I was born in New York City on the thirtieth of December 1936 and was brought up in a very grand private house 19 Grammercy Park.”), Sonnenberg more famously founded, published, and for a time edited Grand Street (1981-2004; Jean Stein took over as editor in 1990), one of the best—some would say the best—American literary magazines of the twentieth century.

Sonnenberg died this past June. The October 18, 2010 issue of The Nation includes a fantastic article by Maria Margaronis describing Sonnenberg editor, writer, friend of Margaronis, and former Nation contributor. Here’s an excerpt from Margaronis’s article, “A Man of Enthusiasms,” discussing the important place in literary publishing Grand Street once held:

It is difficult to describe the place that Grand Street held in the literary and political landscape of the 1980s. It was sui generis, eclectic and unclassified; it stood (as E.M. Forster said of Ben’s beloved Cavafy) at a slight angle to the universe. At a time when celebrity culture was being dressed up as respectable in magazines like Interview and the revived Vanity Fair, when advertising revenues were on every editor’s mind, when uncritical support for Israel had deformed the morals of a significant part of the intellectual left, Grand Street was incorruptible. Funded by the proceeds from Benjamin Sonnenberg père‘s public relations business—and the engine of his son’s final liberation from him—it kept blithely aloof from commerce and fashion, refusing to be dutiful or polite. Like all great magazines, it was the pure expression of its editor’s sensibility: cosmopolitan, rebellious, sybaritic, recherché. Adept at irony (he had a recurring dream of being cut at a party by Henry James), Ben wasted no time worrying about the spurious contradiction between elite intellectual tastes and radical political ones. “In the end,” writes Theodor Adorno, one of his guiding lights, “glorification of splendid underdogs is nothing other than glorification of the splendid system that makes them so.” Ben published whom and what he liked, and if it happened to be beyond the reader’s ken, then it was the reader’s luck to have stumbled on something new.