Knox Burger

In college, Knox Burger was the editor of "The Cornell Widow" during fall 1942 and spring 1943. He left college in April 1943 to join the Army. In the service, he contributed freelance reportage, fiction and humor to "Yank," the Army Weekly, 1943-1944. While serving with a B-29 bomb squadron in the Marianas, he covered a number of missions over Japan, and was transferred to the "Yank" Saipan bureau late summer 1945 just before the Japanese surrender. He moved north to Tokyo, where he was, for a few months, the editor of the Far East edition of Yank, and wrote numerous stories about the occupation. After the war, he did a brief stint at the Harvard graduate school, selling occasional fiction and articles to national magazines. In 1947, Burger was hired by "Collier's," and became its fiction editor in 1948. In 1951, he left "Collier's" to edit books - mostly suspense novels - for Dell. After nine years there, he spent 1960-1970 doing the same thing for Fawcett Publications. Among the writers he worked with during those 20 years were Kurt Vonnegut, John D. MacDonald, John Steinbeck, Ray Bradbury, Jack Finney, Horace McCoy, Walter Tevis, MacKinlay Kantor, Morris West and Louis L'Amour. In April, 1970, he established, in partnership with his wife, writer and sculptor Kitty Sprague, a literary agency (Knox Burger Associates), setting up in the basement of the brownstone on Washington Square in which they lived. In the spring of 2000, he merged his agency with the Harold Ober agency.