During William Whitworth's twenty-year tenure as editor-in-chief of The Atlantic Monthly, he established a reputation for timeliness, quality, and range which has made The Atlantic Monthly one of the most influential and well-read magazines in print.

In presenting Whitworth with the 1993 National Magazine Award for General Excellence, the judges said The Atlantic Monthly "offers the best in analysis, fiction, and reporting . . . . In an age of specialization The Atlantic Monthly covers science, literature, the arts, and national and international affairs . . . . The magazine holds all this together by a respect for language, reasonableness and careful thought, graphic elegance, and a capacity to surprise and entertain . . . . The writing is audacious . . . . Our screeners pay it the highest compliment of all: 'The Atlantic Monthly is a must-read. . . .' "

In recent years article subjects have ranged from the new intellectuals to the crisis of public order, from the debate over immigration to the rise of the Internet, from chain saws to bow ties. This generous scope follows in The Atlantic Monthly's tradition as a wide-ranging general-interest magazine. The Atlantic Monthly is now 140 years old, and Whitworth was the eleventh editor-in-chief.

Whitworth grew up in Little Rock, Arkansas. From 1960 to 1963 he was a general-assignment reporter at The Arkansas Gazette. For the next two years he was a reporter at The New York Herald Tribune, where he shared feature-writing duties with Tom Wolfe, Jimmy Breslin, and Charles Portis; he also covered city and national politics and traveled extensively to cover the beginnings of the student anti-war movement. In 1966 Whitworth joined The New Yorker as a staff writer. In 1973 he gave up writing, for the most part, and became an associate editor of The New Yorker, editing a large share of the magazine's main nonfiction pieces. Whitworth arrived at The Atlantic Monthly in 1980.