Whitney Lyon Balliett (April 17, 1926 – February 1, 2007) was a jazz critic and book reviewer for The New Yorker and was with the journal from 1954 until 2001.
Balliett was born in Manhattan and raised in Glen Cove, New York, on Long Island.
[citation needed] He was drafted into the Army in 1946, interrupting his freshman year at Cornell University, to which he returned to finish his degree in 1951 and where he was a member of Delta Phi fraternity.
He then took a job at The New Yorker, where he was hired by Katherine White, one of the magazine's fiction editors.
[1] Acclaimed for his literary writing style, Balliett died at his Manhattan home on February 1, 2007, aged 80, from liver cancer.