Ralph Graves

Vital editor of LIFE

I met Ralph Graves in 1993, when I was editor of the relaunched monthly Life. My colleagues and I had just reformatted the magazine; he dropped in to introduce himself and to tell me this Life was about half as good as the one he had worked for across 24 years. I wasn't crushed--half as good as the adventuresome and immensely popular weekly Life that Ralph edited from 1969 to 1972 wasn't bad at all. His phenomenal efficiency (a colleague once said, "The bottom of his inbox was always visible") gave no hint of his imagination (he wrote a vivid novel...

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