Clay Felker, the editor who created New York magazine and sat atop the mastheads of The Village Voice, Esquire, Manhattan, inc., M., and New West, has died.

As far back as 2006, Forbes' James Brady was reporting that the legendary editor was ailing and had been moved to a nursing home. That same year, Mr. Felker's wife, the writer Gail Sheehy, wrote an article for Tango magazine wrote about their life together.

In an obituary for Mr. Felker on the Web site of the magazine he created first as a supplement to The New York Herald Tribune, then as a stand-alone magazine in 1968, Kurt Andersen (himself a former editor of the magazine) writes:

Clay Felker’s own rock stardom as a media pioneer, however, endures. It doesn’t matter that he did his great, seminal work way back when. So did Bob Dylan and Brian Wilson and Paul McCartney. During the seventies and eighties, the Times (and much of the rest of mainstream media) thoroughly Felkerized itself. Practically every species of insidery, smart-ass Web journalism carries bits of his DNA. He permanently transformed his white-hot corner of the world. And on these very pages, fresh chapters of his novel about the city are still being published every week.

In the 2003 35th anniversary issue of New York, Michael Wolff wrote:

Clay ... created a magazine that offered a precise map for becoming what the magazine was about. I was going to say that in many ways it was like a hobby magazine, or computer magazine, which are all about the equipment you need to pursue your interests, but those magazines, too, were influenced by this one.

He had the crass but revolutionary (revolutionary in the sense that it overthrew generations of class conceits) notion that you are what you buy. He sniffed the great consumer revolution with its social, political, and aesthetic implications. And New York Magazine became the first magazine to spell out where to get the goods (and at the best price).

In a tribute to Mr. Felker from California magazine (posted on the Web site for U.C. Berkeley, where he taught journalism), Tom Wolfe, Gloria Steinem, and Ken Auletta pay their respects. Mr. Auletta wrote, "As an editor, Felker had two biases. Before each of us went out on a story, he instructed us to be sure to answer two questions: Why are things the way they are? How do things work? He knew if we answered those two questions the piece would succeed."

Update, 12:49 PM EST: New York's current editor, Adam Moss, released this statement:

American journalism would not be what it is today without Clay Felker, and neither would New York City. Those of us lucky enough to work in the house that he built are reminded everyday of the depth of his genius. He created a kind of magazine that had never been seen before, told a kind of story that had never been told. Nobody I have ever met in this business was as passionate a champion of talent, as relentlessly curious, or as successful in getting the world inside his head onto the magazine page. He changed the way we look at this city, and, in that sense, the way we live in it. All of us who practice journalism today carry Clay’s legacy into everything we do, and we will never do it even half as well.