[2] In 1960, on completion of his BA in English/Journalism at the University of Oklahoma (where he wrote for the student newspaper),[2] Whitworth began work at the Arkansas Gazette where he covered low-level community and political stories.
[3] After 4 years at the Gazette, he moved to New York to work as a reporter for the New York Herald Tribune from 1963 to 1966, covering the political turmoil of the 1960s beginning with the Kennedy assassination, and including the student antiwar movement, Harlem riots, and Bobby Kennedy's U.S. Senate race.
[2] From 1966 to 1980, he was hired by William Shawn as a columnist for The New Yorker,[4] writing celebrity features, and reporting other entertaining subjects, including making regular contributions to the "Talk of the Town" section.
[6] Whitworth began his editing career at The New Yorker, working with such other columnists as Pauline Kael, and writers of contributed pieces.
In a 2011 interview with Marc Smirnoff of The Oxford American, he said that one of his most challenging writers was journalist Robert Caro, whose book The Power Broker was excerpted in the New Yorker in four installments in 1974.