John Richardson wrote in a 2007
Vanity Fair article that "
Jason Epstein's assessment of Silvers as 'The most brilliant editor of a magazine ever to have worked in this country' has been 'shared by virtually all of us who have been published by Robert Silvers'". The British newspaper
The Guardian called Silvers "the greatest literary editor there has ever been", while
Library of America remembered him as "an unsurpassed editor who helped define and sustain the literary and intellectual culture of New York and America".
The New York Times described him as "the voracious
polymath, the obsessive perfectionist, the slightly unknowable bachelor-workaholic with the colossal Rolodexes and faintly British diction", "Bob's edits are scrupulous, comprehensive, and precise. They are frequently aimed at saving the reviewer's face."
Susan Sontag, a prolific contributor to the
Review and a close friend of Silvers, called him a "fantastic, fanatical, brilliant" editor. In a 2012 profile of Silvers,
The New York Times noted: "His greatest pleasure... is simply good writing, which he talks about as others talk about fine wine or good food. Speaking about writers he likes, he sometimes flushes with enthusiasm. 'I admire great writers, people with marvelous and beautiful minds, and always hope they will do something special and revealing for us.'" Philip Marino, in
The University of Chicago Magazine, commented: "Like a chemist pairing ingredients to induce a specific reaction, Silvers has built his career matching the right author and subject, in hopes of generating an exciting and illuminating result.... 'he puts a writer together with material that even the writer might not have thought was appropriate,' says
Daniel Mendelsohn". In
The Nation, Harvard professor
Stanley Hoffmann observed that, in publishing some of the earliest criticisms of the Vietnam and Iraq wars, Silvers realized what other commentators missed: "In both instances, Bob Silvers was, in effect, whether deliberately or not, compensating for the weaknesses of the more established media.... It was important that a journal which has the authority of the
Review in a sense took up the slack and presented viewpoints which were extremely hard to get into the established media."
The Nation added, during the Iraq war:One suspects [the editors of the
Review] yearn for the day when they can return to their normal publishing routine – that gentlemanly
pastiche of philosophy, art, classical music, photography, German and Russian history, East European politics, literary fiction – unencumbered by political duties of a confrontational or oppositional nature. That day has not yet arrived. If and when it does, let it be said that the editors met the challenges of the post-9/11 era in a way that most other leading American publications did not, and that
The New York Review of Books... was there when we needed it most.
Adam Gopnik wrote that Silvers "raised the brow not just of American criticism – bringing elements of rigor, argument, and expansiveness to reviewing and reporting that remain intimidating to this day – but of American intellectual life." Silvers had a reputation for hiring and developing assistants who later became prominent in journalism, academia and literature. In 2010,
New York magazine featured several of these, including
Jean Strouse,
Deborah Eisenberg,
Mark Danner and
A. O. Scott. Two of his former assistants, Gabriel Winslow-Yost and
Emily Greenhouse, were appointed co-editors of the
Review in 2019. In 2011,
Oliver Sacks identified Silvers as his "favorite New Yorker, living or dead, real or fictional", saying that the
Review is "one of the great institutions of intellectual life here or anywhere."
Timothy Noah at
Politico concluded that Silvers "made the
New York Review the country’s best and most influential literary journal". == Work habits and editorial approach ==