The New Yorker, June 13, 1994 P. 11
Obituary of Ely Jacques Kahn, Jr., who died last week, at the age of seventy-seven, after an automobile accident. He began to write for THE NEW YORKER in 1937, when he was a senior at Harvard. He sold the magazine a casual about meeting an African potentate in Edinburgh during a summer vacation, and shortly thereafter Harold Ross offered him a job as a Talk of the Town reporter. His starting salary was twenty-five dollars a week, and the words and pieces began to spill out of his Remington. (He never yielded to the vogue for electric or electronic machines.) He had a steady fifty-six year output--sixty Profiles; forty Reporter At Large pieces; sixty war pieces (including accounts of his own service); twenty-seven night-club columns; sports pieces (he covered nine Olympic Games for the magazine); and truly innumerable unsigned Talk of the Town stories--comes to something over three million words: by far a greater total than anyone else here had knocked off. Kahn's writing was notable for its range, as well as its clarity. He wrote Profiles about a champion fox terrier; one about Eleanor Roosevelt, another about Frank Sinatra and one on Judge Wapner. He wrote a famous series about Coca-Cola, and one about the world's foodstuffs. Kahn was a short, strongly built man with a smiling face. Underneath this Hildy Johnson exterior, though, he was a man of deep feeling and private generosity. He loved tennis, backgammon, and crossword puzzles. His major at Harvard had been Latin and Greek, which is evident in his writing style: superbly classical, terse, graceful, and lyrical with detail.
