Russell Lynes

• Name — Russell Lynes • Born — December 2, 1910 • Birthplace — Great Barrington, Massachusetts • Died — September 14, 1991 (aged 80) • Place of death — New York City • Occupation — Art historian, photographer, author, editor • Notable Works — The Tastemakers, Snobs • Spouse — Mildred Akin • Education — Yale University • Children — 2

Born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, Lynes was the younger son of Adelaide Sparkman and Joseph Russell Lynes. His older brother was George Platt Lynes (1907–1955), the photographer. In 1932, he graduated from Yale University.

Lynes started as a clerk at Harper & Brothers, the publishing house, from 1932 to 1936 and was director of publications at Vassar in 1936 and 1937. He then took a job at the Shipley School in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, where he was assistant principal from 1937 to 1940, then principal until 1944. He then joined Harper's Magazine as an assistant editor and became managing editor in 1947, a position he would hold for the next twenty years. Lynes was interested in historic preservation, notably and influentially writing about the threat to Olana, the home of Frederic Church in upstate New York, in The Tastemakers and in the February 1965 issue of Harper's.

In 1934, he married Mildred Akin (died 1999), who was a Vassar graduate, the step-daughter of artist Henry Ives Cobb, Jr. (1883–1974) and a granddaughter of George W. Wickersham (1858–1936), U.S. Attorney General under William Howard Taft. Together, they had two children: • George Platt Lynes II (died 2015), who married Jane Lynes. • Elizabeth R. Lynes (1939–2015), who married Sidney Hollander in 1962. They divorced and in 1997, she married Carl Kaestle (born 1940). He died on September 14, 1991, in New York City at Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center.