Lawrence Rust "Rusty" Hills (November 9, 1924 – August 12, 2008) was an American author and fiction editor at Esquire from 1957 to 1964.
Authors he championed include Norman Mailer, John Cheever, William Styron, Bruce Jay Friedman, William Gaddis, James Salter, Don DeLillo, Joy Williams, Ann Beattie, Richard Ford, Raymond Carver and E. Annie Proulx.
[1] His 1972 book How To Do Things Right: The Revelations of a Fussy Man was a set of humorous essays filled with obsessively-detailed instructions on, for example, the correct way to make and eat milk-toast and clean ashtrays which "throughout its whole lifetime in a well-ordered household,an ashtray need never travel more than three feet from where it belongs, and never be out of place at all for more than thirty seconds".
Contributors included Updike, Mailer, Capote, Southern, Barth and Roth.
[1] His survivors are his wife of 35 years, writer Joy Williams, and daughter Caitlin Hills.