[2] Duke Magazine created the staff position of Clay Felker Fellow for "an aspiring journalist with unusual promise.
Felker gave Gloria Steinem what she later called her first "serious assignment", regarding contraception; he didn't like her first draft and had her re-write the article.
[6] Her resulting 1962 article,[6] about the way in which women are forced to choose between a career and marriage, preceded Betty Friedan's book The Feminine Mystique by one year.
Steinem joined the founding staff of Felker's New York magazine and became politically active in the feminist movement.
[6] After losing a battle for Esquire editorship to Harold Hayes, Felker left to join The New York Herald Tribune in 1962.
He revamped a Sunday section into New York and hired writers such as Tom Wolfe and Jimmy Breslin.
New York became one of the most imitated magazines of its time, both from a design perspective and in the way it combined service and life-style articles.
[8] Felker became editor-in-chief and publisher of The Village Voice in 1974; he resigned from New York following its hostile takeover by Rupert Murdoch in 1976.
[6] Felker's stylish but detached role as the founder and editor of New York magazine led some observers to compare him with another American mid-Westerner who went east—albeit a fictional one, Scott Fitzgerald's Jay Gatsby.
[1] Tom Wolfe said: "He ranks with Henry Luce of Time, Harold Ross of the New Yorker and Jann Wenner of Rolling Stone in that these are all people that brought out magazines that had a new take on life in America.