Barbara Epstein: In February 1963, the printers at the New York Times went on strike. Until then, the paper's book review section had been seen as the ultimate arbiter of literary and academic quality in the United States. Its own quality, however, was not universally acknowledged.
In New York City itself, a group of serious young intellectuals, writers and publishers despised the NYT for what they saw as its philistinism and low standards.
One night at dinner in the apartment of Barbara and Jason Epstein, a group of these critics were rejoicing at the disappearance of the paper from the Manhattan bookstands when they realised that the event was not just a source of satisfaction; it was also a business opportunity.
Besides Jason, a powerful young editor at the leading trade publisher Random House and his wife Barbara, one of the editors of the influential Partisan Review, those present included the poet Robert Lowell, his wife Elizabeth Hardwick and Robert Silvers.
It was this group that founded the New York Review of Books, which went on to become the leading intellectual journal of the English-speaking world - though if its pre-eminence is acknowledged, it is also bitterly resented both by those who dislike its left-of-centre politics and by those who feel excluded from its magic circle.
From the start, Silvers and Barbara Epstein, who has died of lung cancer aged 76, became joint editors.
Under their guidance the paper adopted a style that distinguished it from all previous New York journals.
It was, for one thing, utterly and unapologetically "New York" in manner, at the same time managing to be international - and specifically Anglophile - in its perspective and choice of reviewers.
It was serious to the verge of elitism and also radical, particularly where American foreign policy was concerned.
It has shown itself as effective in exposing the errors and the cynicism of the Bush administration's policy in Iraq as it was in criticising America's war in Vietnam.
Both Silvers and Epstein pursued their announced goal of excellence with almost manic patience and determination. Reviewers were pursued, badgered, flattered, cajoled and bullied into delivering what the editors had visualised.
They almost invented their own genre, the extended review essay, written by an acknowledged expert who could judge the books under review as the work of equals.
Epstein was born Barbara Zimmerman in Boston, and educated at Radcliffe College, then the all-women's college that lived in symbiosis with all-male Harvard.
After working in publishing, where, in 1952, she championed the publication of The Diary of Anne Frank in the US, she joined the Partisan Review, a small circulation journal that epitomised the attitude and the interests of New York intellectuals.
While Silvers has become a legendary figure for his meticulous and obsessive work at the New York Review, those who know them both and their work insist that Epstein's contribution has been underestimated.
She said of their partnership that it was "like this incredible old marriage, you know, it's just, ma and pa. Well. It works, I hope."
The poet James Fenton, who has worked for both Epstein and Silvers, told Guardian Unlimited that "everything is decided jointly. A lot of the commissioning and the choice of writers is Barbara's. People don't realise how much she does."
Epstein certainly helped to set the review's political compass. It has always been on the left, though over the years more interested in foreign policy and the ethics of American government than in the wonkish details of policy.
As well as publishing the most brilliant reporting and the most penetrating analysis of the Vietnam and Iraq wars, the review has published long and serious analyses of economic policy and, for example, of the shortcomings of the great American universities.
The editors could hardly deny, and Barbara Epstein proudly proclaimed, a liberal point of view, but what was perhaps more fundamental to their philosophy was scepticism about the great American mainstream culture "out there".
Many have pointed out, with varying degrees of scorn, that the review seems more at home in Hampstead or Cambridge - England not Massachusetts - than in Chicago or Houston.
"This sense of exile from the American mainstream," one essentially friendly critic observed, "becomes more pronounced the closer you get to the magazine."
Epstein, talking in her offices, seemed the epitome of the New York intellectual - animated, husky, indefatigable.
"Even in the 1950s, as far as I can remember, when the country was terribly pious, I don't remember that it was quite like this," she said. "It's another country out there, really," waving her hand to shroud an entire continent in darkness and religious belief.
Epstein, who married in 1954, was divorced in 1980. She is survived by her son Jacob and daughter Helen.
Barbara Epstein: born August 30th 1929; died June 16th, 2006