Whitney Balliett

Who was Whitney Balliett?

Whitney Lyon Balliett was a jazz critic and book reviewer for the New Yorker and was with the journal from 1954 until 2001.

Born in Manhattan and raised in Glen Cove, Long Island, Balliett attended Phillips Exeter Academy, where he learned to play drums in a band he summed up as “baggy Dixieland”; he played summer gigs at a Center Island yacht club.

He was drafted into the Army in 1946, interrupting his freshman year at Cornell University, to which returned to finish his degree in 1951 and where he was a member of The Delta Phi Fraternity. He then went on to a job at The New Yorker, where he was hired by Katherine White, one of the magazine’s fiction editors.

Acclaimed for his literary writing style Whitney Balliett died on 1 February 2007, aged 80, from cancer, survived by his second wife Nancy Balliett and five children:James Fargo Balliett, Blue Balliett, Will Balliett, Julie Lyon Rose, and Whitney Balliett, Jr.