October 7, 1922

William Zinsser (October 7, 1922 to May 12, 2015) was a good friend of Cleveland Amory's and therefore may be assumed to be conversant with animal welfare issues. I say this because feline references in Zinsser's own writing are sparse. He mentions that while vacationing in Africa he felt obliged to see a lion, or not be able to face Hemingway later.

His Salon obituary stresses Zinsser's role as an authority on prose.

Zinsser’s “On Writing Well” was standard reading for many students and professional people seeking to sharpen their prose style. He championed the craft of nonfiction and inspired professionals and amateurs to express themselves more clearly and vividly. He wrote more than a dozen other books, including “Writing to Learn,” ”Writing With a Word Processor” and “Writing About Your Life.”

In "On Writing Well" Zinsser mentions Don Marquis, a fellow journalist. He uses Marquis to illustrate the use of humor to deal with the topic of boring old people.He does this by having Mehitabel talk about "an old theater cat named Tom." who thought the world had gotten worse since his kittenhood. 

The LA Times has a longer article on Zinsser, which we excerpt:

A former staffer at the New York Herald Tribune, Zinsser later freelanced for the Atlantic, the New Yorker and other magazines and was executive editor of the Book-of-the-Month Club.

He wrote or edited two dozen books, including ""Writing about Your Life: A Journey into the Past" (2004) and "Writing Places: The Life Journey of a Writer and Teacher" (2009).

In his last years, the self-described "lifelong child of paper" even wrote a popular blog, "Zinsser on Fridays," for the American Scholar. It won a National Magazine Award for digital commentary in 2012.

He had his greatest impact, however, as a teacher of writing. He was a member of the English faculty at Yale University for most of the 1970s, imparting his plainspoken truths about his craft to students who became professional writers, including Christopher Buckley, .... and Jane Mayer.

Zinsser was born in New York on Oct. 7, 1922. Once described by George F. Will as a "self-effacing and decorous WASP," he grew up on Long Island in a prosperous household headed by his newspaper-clipping mother, Joyce, and businessman father William Sr.

A graduate of Princeton University, Zinsser served in North Africa and Italy for the Army during World War II. Then, rejecting the family shellac business, he went into journalism. He worked at the New York Herald Tribune from 1946 to 1959 in a variety of jobs, including feature writer, drama editor and film critic.

He married Caroline Fraser in 1954. Besides his wife, he is survived by two children, Amy and John; and several grandchildren.

My favorite anecdote about the man who urged people to simplify their writing while he himself usually included his middle name on his books, may be:

After leaving the paper Zinsser turned to freelancing. His assignments included celebrity profiles, such as a 1963 feature for the Saturday Evening Post on an up-and-coming comic named Woody Allen. Almost two decades later, Allen the movie star-director gave Zinsser a tiny role in 1980's "Stardust Memories" as an unfriendly Catholic priest.....