Daniel Menaker, author and celebrated editor at the New Yorker and Random House, dies at 79

At age 10, Daniel Menaker arrived home from his progressive school in Greenwich Village with a story to tell. His teacher had asked if anyone knew the names of Columbus’s three ships, leading a girl to raise her hand and declare they were “the Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe.”

With encouragement from his mother, a copy editor at Fortune magazine, Mr. Menaker wrote down the account of fractured history and sent it to the New Yorker, which adapted it into a Talk of the Town item in 1951.