The Met: One Hundred Years of Grand Opera

Martin Mayer was an author, journalist and critic who wrote more than 40 books and hundreds of articles for laymen that demystified lawyers, banking, and thorny school problems. He started out as an old-time freelancer, writing 1,000 words a night. Then for a half-century, Mr. Mayer was a Renaissance man of letters, taking readers on show more behind-the-scene tours of Wall Street, Madison Avenue, the practice of law, and the tangles of a racially divisive New York City teachers strike. He wrote three novels; columns for Esquire magazine; was a music critic for a British journal; wrote for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, composed reports for the Ford, Carnegie and Kettering Foundations; and served on White House panels in the Kennedy and Reagan administrations. After graduating from Harvard he edited a scholarly labor publication, a pulp detective magazine and paperback Westerns. Landing at Esquire in 1951, he edited fiction, wrote articles and finished his first novel, "The Experts". Many of his books examined familiar professions and institutions, with titles like Madison Avenue, U.S.A. (1958), Wall Street: Men and Money (1960), The Schools (1961), The Lawyers (1967), About Television (1972), The Bankers (1974), The Builders: Houses, People, Neighborhoods, Governments, Money (1978) and The Diplomats (1983). Martin Prager Mayer was born in Manhattan on Jan. 14, 1928, the only child of Henry and Ruby (Prager) Mayer. In 1949, Mr. Mayer married Ellen Moers, an author and professor of literature. She died in 1979. In 1980, Mr. Mayer married Karin Lissakers, a Swedish-born writer and former State Department official who subsequently became the United States executive director of the International Monetary Fund. Martin Mayer passed away on August 1, 2019 at the age of 91 due to complications of Parkinson's disease. (Bowker Author Biography) show less