Remembering Ed Fancher, a Village Voice Founder
He kept the paper alive through the early, lean years.
by R.C. BAKER
![Village Voice article about the death of Edwin Fancher, one of the paper's founders.](https://www.villagevoice.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/1_2017_EF-portrait-1957_0410_masthead-EF-1366x794.jpg)
The front page of the January 4, 1956, issue of the Village Voice looked much like the others that had run since a trio of World War II vets founded the paper, three months earlier: the elegant Voice logo, designed by the painter Nell Blaine; a headline about Off-Broadway theater; a picture of the artist Marcel Duchamp, who had recently become an American citizen; and a headshot of the novelist Norman Mailer. What wasn’t typical was one of the bylines: “Edwin Fancher, Publisher of The Village Voice.”
Fancher had mostly handled the business end of things: advertising, circulation, and distribution. But in this eleventh issue of the paper, he announced, “Leading Novelist to Write a Column for ‘The Voice,’” followed by:
Beginning with our next issue The Village Voice will have a weekly column contributed to our pages by Norman Mailer. Mr. Mailer needs no introduction to most of our readers. At the age of 32 he has already had a most controversial career, and each of his three novels has received almost a total spectrum of praise and abuse. For your curiosity we quote these samples, inspired by The Naked and the Dead:
“The greatest writer to come out of his generation” — Sinclair Lewis.
“Insidious slime” — Life magazine.
Fancher went on to enumerate more of Mailer’s contrasting reviews, noting that the famous writer had to go through six publishers before one would agree to print a “debatable passage” of six lines contained in his third novel, The Deer Park, which, Fancher noted, “received without question the most contradictory and confusing reviews of any novel in years.”