Joel Conarroe, ‘hub of the New York literary wheel,’ dies at 89

Mr. Conarroe was a central figure in the world of letters for decades, with stints as executive director of the Modern Language Association, the nation’s leading scholarly organization for language and literature, and president of PEN America (formerly PEN American Center), a writers organization. He was a tastemaker as chair of the National Book Award fiction jury, the Pulitzer Prize fiction jury and other such posts.

He was best known for helming the Guggenheim Foundation from 1985 to 2003, where he was only the third president in the history of the organization.

“He was attuned to changing cultural mores — the twists and turns in dozens of academic and artistic fields — while dealing with the financial challenges and working to raise the amount of fellowships so that people could do their own work,” Edward Hirsch, current president of the foundation, wrote in an email.

Robert Caro, the Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer of Lyndon B. Johnson and New York urban planner Robert Moses, served with Mr. Conarroe on the Guggenheim board and recalled his air of authority at the foundation.

“I had never seen meetings, sometimes with long, complicated agendas, run with such graciousness, and yet firmness,” Caro wrote in an email. “As I got a close-up of Joel in his professional life, I marveled again and again at the unchanging integrity with which he made decisions, and not just at the Guggenheim but on the many, many committees that award literary prizes.”

Mr. Conarroe’s prominence in the literary world extended to academia: He served on the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania for nearly two decades, including eight years as a professor in the English department, rising to department chair. He spent two years in the 1980s as the dean of Penn’s School of Arts & Sciences.

But his contributions to literature stretched far beyond the accomplishments listed on his curriculum vitae.

Known to be gregarious, courtly and wickedly funny, he often threw parties studded with literary stars such as Caro and Calvin Trillin at the Century club in Manhattan. And he frequently presided over de facto literary salons at restaurants in the West Village, where he lived on West 11th Street amid towering stacks of books with his two cats, Betty (after Betty Comden, a Broadway lyricist and playwright, who had been a close friend) and Buster (after Buster Crabbe, an Olympic swimmer and actor).

“Joel was the hub of the New York literary wheel,” author Patricia Volk, a longtime friend, said in an interview. “He brought people together, fixed them up, and it always took. He knew exactly who would like who.”

Another close friend, novelist Benjamin Taylor, said: “His great gift was for friendship. He made each of us feel we were rare birds in his aviary.”

Perhaps none of his friendships were as close — or as complicated — as his half-century-long tenure as a defender and confidant of Roth, a brilliant and often profane giant of 20th century literature.

Mr. Conarroe was “without question Roth’s most intimate male friend,” Blake Bailey wrote in his 2021 book, “Philip Roth: The Biography” — so close that the author’s mother, Bess Roth, called him her “other son.”

Over the years, Mr. Conarroe provided Roth, who also served on the Penn faculty, valued feedback on manuscripts for his novels, watched baseball games and shared gossip with him, and accompanied him to parties and awards dinners. In 2006, he slept at Roth’s apartment on what Mr. Conarroe considered a possible suicide watch while the author was mired in a deep depression after the end of a passionate affair with a younger woman.

“Last night was grim,” Mr. Conarroe wrote in an email to Taylor at the time, as reported in the biography. “Long crying jags, with arias alternating between denouncing the selfish b**** and lamentations over the loss of ‘my darling beautiful girl.’”

It was hardly the first time that he had come to Roth’s aid when the author was distraught over a woman. In 1975, Mr. Conarroe moved in with him at his Connecticut country house after another Roth breakup. The two would whip up a lavish dinner and polish it off over a bottle of wine, with flowers on the table, Bailey wrote.

In those years, Mr. Conarroe had not yet disclosed that he was gay. Two years later, in fact, he began a long-term relationship with Pulitzer Prize-winning composer David Del Tredici while tending Roth’s house while the author was in London.

Still, despite their closeness, he later said that there was not “a scintilla of sexual chemistry” between him and Roth, whom he rated a zero on the 0-6 Kinsey scale of straight to gay. “Everyone is a little gay, maybe,” he said. “But not Philip.”

Joel Osborne Conarroe was born Oct. 23, 1934, in West Orange, New Jersey, the third of five children of Elvin Conarroe, an executive at insurance company Metropolitan Life, and Elizabeth (Lofland) Conarroe, a secretary at the company. He spent much of his youth in the tiny town of Mountain Lakes, in the rolling hills of New Jersey’s Piedmont region.

The family moved to Bradenton, Florida, when Mr. Conarroe was in high school. After graduating, he received a bachelor’s degree in English from Davidson College in North Carolina in 1956, a master’s in English from Cornell University the next year and a doctorate in English from New York University in 1966. He began his long academic career as an assistant professor at Penn the same year.

He is survived by his sister, Harriet Conarroe.

While best known as a champion of other writers’ works, Mr. Conarroe proved more than capable with a pen himself. He published analyses of the poetry of William Carlos Williams and John Berryman and edited multiple poetry anthologies, including “Six American Poets,” a widely circulated 1993 survey of works by Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost and others.

That anthology found unlikely fame in the 1990s, when Joseph Brodsky, then the nation’s poet laureate, spearheaded a program to include a copy alongside the Gideons Bible in thousands of hotel and motel rooms around the country.

“I told Joel,” Volk said, “that it was the most stolen book in the history of publishing.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.