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Howard Junker

American magazine editor and publisher

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Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionSep 1, 2026
Entity authorityQ5920051
Source-derived summary

Howard Junker (born 1940) is a writer, editor, and founder of the literary journal ZYZZYVA.

Early life and education

Howard Junker was born in 1940 in Port Washington, New York, and educated at Canterbury School (Connecticut). He graduated from Amherst College in 1961, and earned an M.A. from the University of San Francisco in 1978.

Career

Junker's work as a journalist appeared in a range of American magazines from the mid-1960s, including Art in America, Artforum, Film Comment, Film Quarterly, The Nation, The New Republic, New York, Playboy, Rolling Stone, The Village Voice and Vogue.

His 1965 article in The Nation about Andy Warhol's work as a filmmaker—among the first articles on the subject—is anthologized in a collection of notable film writing from the magazine. Junker's production notes on the Maysles Brothers/Charlotte Zwerin film Salesmen (1969), included in a contemporaneous book about the film, lend insight to the methods of these pioneering documentarians.

In 1985, Junker founded the literary journal ZYZZYVA. The journal initially emphasized west coast writers and later broadened to focus on new work from around the United States and internationally. Under Junker's editorship, ZYZZYVA published early works by Po Bronson, Chitra Divakaruni, F.X. Toole, David Rains Wallace and Sherman Alexie, among others. ZYZZYVA also presented Haruki Murakami's first English-language publication. Junker retired from ZYZZYVA in 2010 and was succeeded by Laura Cogan. He has edited several anthologies of works published in ZYZZYVA, as well as a multi-volume memoir and an oral history, "Lord Jeff & The Closet." He resides in San Francisco.

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“Howard Junker” enters the record as american magazine editor and publisher. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Howard, Junker and American can confirm, complicate or overturn.

Editorial reviewA practical starting point whose main value is the path it opens into stronger specialist and primary sources. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1940, 1961, 1978, 1965—that can be checked directly. The linked authority record independently contributes the date 1940. Its strongest next move is a source search built around Howard, Junker and American.
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“Howard Junker” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Howard, Junker and American provides the most credible route into that argument.

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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 1, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5920051. VIAF identifies the subject as 53324763. The Library of Congress control number is n91023739. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1940, 1961, 1978 and 1965.

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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from Howard Junker” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.