Burger, Knox

In college, Burger was the editor of the Cornell Widow from the fall of 1942 to 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. 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 in the summer of 1945, just before the Japanese surrender. Burger 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, Burger did a brief stint at the Harvard graduate school, selling occasional fiction and articles to national magazines. In 1947, he was hired by Collier's (one of our leading defunct magazines), and became its fiction editor in 1948. In 1951, he left Collier's to edit books - mostly suspense novels - for Dell. Burger edited at Dell for 9 years, and spent 1960-1970 editing 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 1970 Burger established, in partnership with his wife, 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.

Knox Burger died in Manhattan on January 4, 2010.

Source - from a text written for Fales by Knox Burger

From the guide to the Knox Burger Archive, ca. 1969-2000, (© 2010 Fales Library and Special Collections)