“As a magazine editor in the 1950s, Knox Burger published Kurt Vonnegut’s first short story. As a book editor in the 1960s, he asked John D. MacDonald to create a mystery series around a character who eventually turned out to be the detective Travis McGee. And as a literary agent in the 1970s, he took on a novel about a Russian detective by a largely unknown writer — “Gorky Park,” by Martin Cruz Smith — which in 1980 he sold to Random House for $1 million. . . .

From 1948 to 1951 Mr. Burger was the fiction editor of Collier’s, a weekly magazine that competed with The Saturday Evening Post. For two decades after that he edited books, mostly mystery and suspense novels, first for Dell and later for Fawcett Publications, which released MacDonald’s first three Travis McGee novels — “The Deep Blue Good-by,” “Nightmare in Pink” and “A Purple Place for Dying” — one after the other in 1964. . . .

During Mr. Burger’s tenure at Collier’s, a short story by Vonnegut, whom he had known slightly when both were at Cornell and who was then working in public relations for General Electric, crossed his desk. He asked for changes, which Vonnegut made, and the story, “Report on the Barnhouse Effect,” appeared in the magazine in February 1950. It was the first published work of fiction for Vonnegut, who recounted the episode decades later in an interview for The Paris Review.

‘And let it be put on the record here that Knox Burger, who is about my age, discovered and encouraged more good young writers than any other editor of his time,” Vonnegut added. “I don’t think that’s ever been written down anywhere. It’s a fact known only to writers, and one that could easily vanish, if it isn’t somewhere written down.’”

(From the New York Times)