William Zinsser, the much-consulted teacher, author, journalist and essayist whose million-selling book "On Writing Well" championed the craft of nonfiction and inspired professionals and amateurs to express themselves more concisely and vividly, has died at age 92.
Zinsser died at his Manhattan home after a brief illness yesterday, said his wife, Caroline Fraser Zinsser.
A newspaper and magazine reporter into his 40s, Zinsser became a mentor for countless authors, journalists and would-be writers.
"On Writing Well," published in 1976 and praised by The New York Times as worthy of "The Elements of Style," caught on first among college students and professors, then with the general public, selling more than 1 million copies.
At Yale University, where Zinsser taught creative nonfiction in the 1970s, his students included such future stars as Christopher Buckley, Jane Mayer and Mark Singer.
But Zinsser also valued the business executive trying to compose more understandable memos, the lawyer with a life story to share, the church volunteer eager to document her good work. He loved teaching those without special talent, he once explained, and helping them "solve their problems."
Working on an old typewriter, Zinsser wrote more than a dozen other books, including "Writing to Learn," ''Writing With a Word Processor" and the memoir "Writing Places."
He also advised government agencies and corporations, played jazz piano, wrote songs and served as executive editor of the Book-of-the-Month Club. In recent years, he wrote an online column for The American Scholar and taught at Columbia University and The New School for Social Research. After his eyesight failed, he invited students to his apartment and listened to them read from their work.
Zinsser was exacting and open-minded. Good writing, he believed, could come from fiction or nonfiction. He praised the history books of David McCullough and Robert Caro, the journalism of Joan Didion, the sports columns of Red Smith. He welcomed anyone able to write with "vigor, clarity and humanity."
Zinsser, the youngest of four siblings, was born in New York in 1922, the presumed heir to a shellac company his grandfather founded. But journalism was his calling. He taught himself to type and credited his mother with his appreciation for prose writing, remembering how she would clip articles she liked from newspapers.
