Richard Pollak, Founding Editor of More, Dies at 91

Richard Pollak, the founding editor of More magazine, died on Dec. 27 in Stockholm. He was 91, his wife, Diane Walsh, confirmed; the couple had moved from Portland, Maine, to Sweden in May to live near their daughter and grandchildren, and he was in hospice care. More debuted in 1971 after J.

Anthony Lukas recruited Mr. Pollak to run the start-up and William Woodward III provided funding. The magazine, whose cover rendered its name as [More], critiqued the mainstream press’s coverage of subjects including the Vietnam War, President Richard M. Nixon and the oil industry and published pieces that skewered outlets such as The New York Times and Newsweek.

Kevin Lerner wrote in Columbia Journalism Review that the founders viewed the press as “stagnant, conservative and unwilling to examine themselves,” and More published a spiked Baltimore Sun article about Spiro Agnew; Mr. Pollak also vowed to run corrections in a regular spot and believed that helped prod The Times to begin printing daily corrections in 1972.

Financial losses pushed More through a series of sales — to Michael Kramer in 1976 and to James Adler in 1977 — and the magazine closed in 1978. Mr. Pollak left after Mr. Kramer’s acquisition but later returned as an associate editor; in the 1980s he was literary editor and then executive editor of The Nation.

Key Topics

Culture, Richard Pollak, More Magazine, Bruno Bettelheim, J. Anthony Lukas, The Nation