At Lunch with Margalit Fox

Julie Salamon, New York Times best-selling author, sits down with author and journalist Margalit Fox. Fox’s most recent book, The Talented Mrs. Mandelbaum, is a delightful (and true) tour de force about America’s first organized crime boss–who happened to be a Jewish mother of four, respected member of her synagogue. Considered one of the foremost explanatory writers and literary stylists in American journalism, Margalit Fox retired in 2018 from a 24-year-career at the New York Times, where she was most recently a senior writer. As a member of the newspaper’s celebrated obituary news department, she has written the Page One sendoffs of some of the best-known cultural figures of our era, including the pioneering feminist Betty Friedan, the writers Maya Angelou and Toni Morrison, the poet Adrienne Rich, the children’s author Maurice Sendak and the advice columnists Dear Abby and Ann Landers. In 2016, the Poynter Institute named her one of the six best writers in the New York Times’s history. The recipient of the William Saroyan International Prize for Nonfiction, Margalit is the author of four previous narrative nonfiction books: Talking Hands, The Riddle of the Labyrinth, Conan Doyle for the Defense and The Confidence Men. Originally trained as a cellist, she holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in linguistics from Stony Brook University and a master’s degree from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. She lives in Manhattan with her husband, the writer and critic George Robinson. margalitfox.com