Remembering Ed Fancher, a Village Voice Founder

The front page of the January 4, 1956, issue of the Village Voice looked much like the others that had run since a trio of World War II vets founded the paper, three months earlier: the elegant Voice logo, designed by the painter Nell Blaine; a headline about Off-Broadway theater; a picture of the artist Marcel Duchamp, who had recently become an American citizen; and a headshot of the novelist Norman Mailer. What wasn’t typical was one of the bylines: “Edwin Fancher, Publisher of The Village Voice.”

Fancher had mostly handled the business end of things: advertising, circulation, and distribution. But in this eleventh issue of the paper, he announced, “Leading Novelist to Write a Column for ‘The Voice,’” followed by:

Beginning with our next issue The Village Voice will have a weekly column contributed to our pages by Norman Mailer. Mr. Mailer needs no introduction to most of our readers. At the age of 32 he has already had a most controversial career, and each of his three novels has received almost a total spectrum of praise and abuse. For your curiosity we quote these samples, inspired by The Naked and the Dead:

“The greatest writer to come out of his generation” — Sinclair Lewis.

“Insidious slime” — Life magazine.

Fancher went on to enumerate more of Mailer’s contrasting reviews, noting that the famous writer had to go through six publishers before one would agree to print a “debatable passage” of six lines contained in his third novel, The Deer Park, which, Fancher noted, “received without question the most contradictory and confusing reviews of any novel in years.”

“It was a sunny spring day in the Italian hills, and the men were cleaning up around their foxholes and relaxing on the ground.”

Toward the end of this front-page story, Fancher noted, “What may also interest readers of the Voice is that Norman Mailer lived until recently in a cold-water flat on the edge of the Village, has been a contributing editor to Dissent, and has never written a column before.”

Fancher concluded with full financial and journalistic disclosure:

Although Mailer is a minority stockholder in the Voice, the opinions he will express are his own and will not reflect the editorial policy of the paper. What we may expect a little more uncomfortably is some of the possible reactions to what he has to write; for as the above reviews may indicate, Norman Mailer is nothing if not independent, unpredictable, disarming, and irritating by turns. So forewarned, proudly and with our fingers crossed, we welcome Norman Mailer.

Fancher’s take on one of his fellow founders helped set a tone of openness with readers that would be a hallmark of the publication, which would become the progenitor of the entire alternative press movement.

A more personal piece with Fancher’s byline appeared in the April 10, 1957, issue of the paper. Along with a couple of writers and the paper’s editor, Dan Wolf (who was the third founder), Fancher wrote a remembrance of his feelings on the day he received the news that President Franklin D. Roosevelt had died. FDR’s egalitarian New Deal policies and tough humanism certainly provided a template for the Voice’s “speak truth to power” ethos from early on, and Fancher, a trained psychologist, was no doubt aware of what he was revealing about himself when he wrote a single paragraph for the feature “The day he died … April 12, 1945.”

It was a sunny spring day in the Italian hills, and the men were cleaning up around their foxholes and relaxing on the ground. It was peaceful, but there was the latent tension perhaps inevitable in the lull before a big offensive. Then I noticed a quiet rustling spreading from fox hole to fox hole along the rough hillside. My first reaction to the news was anger that anyone would joke so cruelly. Then incredulity. Then a sense of profound emptiness and fear, as if I had suddenly been deserted in an open boat in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.

Fancher did have serious concerns about the survival of the paper where he topped the masthead each week as “Edwin Fancher, Publisher.” Ledger pages and letters in the Voice archives reveal him dealing with cash-flow problems, creditors, and payrolls, and basically struggling to keep the publication afloat in the late 1950s. In 1959, for example, even though Mailer was no longer writing for the paper, he was still a stockholder, and so Fancher had to put him off like everyone else the paper owed money to.

But through Fancher’s hard work on the business end and Wolf’s at the editorial desk (and writers and artists who would work for very little — and even sometimes no — pay) the paper finally became profitable a few years later, and Fancher and his fellow founders ended up doing quite well financially.

In 2017, Fancher, by then in his 90s, had his portrait taken for inclusion in the “Village People” section of the “last” print issue of the Village Voice, which was published on September 20, 2017. Fancher and Wolf had lost control of the paper in 1974, when it was bought by Clay Felker, of New York magazine, in a contentious deal (the archives include a 1975 letter to Mailer from Fancher about a lawsuit against Felker). But through a parade of owners (including Rupert Murdoch), the Voice stayed true to the rough and tumble progressivism of its founders.

Fancher is the last of the three to go, but their creation, which has been declared “dead” — generally meaning “irrelevant,” in the eyes of its many enemies — numerous times over the decades, lives on. In fact, there have been eleven print issues since that “last” one Fancher appeared in. Following the tradition he, Wolf, and Mailer started, we still strive to hold the powerful accountable, online, 24/7/365.