Mark Jay Mirsky, Novelist, Professor Emeritus, and Founder of the Literary Journal Fiction

Professor Mark Jay Mirsky, a novelist, longtime professor of English, and founding editor of influential literary magazine Fiction, whose five decades of teaching at the City College of New York inspired generations of writers, died in New York City on Friday, December 5, 2025. He was 86. The cause was apparently a heart attack.

As a writer, Mirsky drew from a wide ranging intellectual curiosity and a deeply honest approach to the creative process, shaped by lasting friendships and exchanges with prominent writers of his generation, including Donald Barthelme, Norman Mailer and Joyce Carol Oates. Two of his early novels, Thou Worm Jacob (1967) and Blue Hill Avenue (1972) are darkly comic community portraits drawing heavily from his childhood in a decaying Jewish Dorchester and America in the 40’s and 50’s, as waves of humanity from the old world crashed onto American soil and mixed in the wake of the Second World War. Both novels were Boston bestsellers, and Blue Hill Avenue was recommended in the New York Times. Proceedings of the Rabble (1970) used an evangelical right-wing political crusade as a frame for a Gonzo depiction of the pressure cooker of rage and paralysis building in American democracy.

Over a career that included more than a dozen books, Mirsky moved easily among genres. His scholarly works included The Drama in Shakespeare’s Sonnets; studies of Jewish mysticism such as The Red Adam and Dante, Eros and Kabbalah; and memoir, notably My Search for the Messiah. He also co-edited The Jews of Pinsk, 1881–1941. A significant part of his scholarly legacy involved his editing of the diaries of Robert Musil, the Austrian modernist best known for The Man Without Qualities. His work on the diaries helped illuminate Musil’s intellectual development and bring greater attention to one of Central Europe’s most challenging literary figures.=

In 1972, he founded literary journal Fiction with Donald Barthelme and others, dedicating it to innovative writing. As its editor for more than 50 years, he cultivated it as a spotlight for unconventional prose, publishing both well known authors and emerging voices and maintaining it as a home for experimental literature even as the wider publishing landscape shifted.

Born in Boston in 1939, Professor Mirsky graduated magna cum laude from Harvard University, where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa, and later earned an M.A. from Stanford University as a Woodrow Wilson Fellow. From 1962 to 1968, he served in the U.S. Air Force Reserve.

He joined the faculty of the City College of New York in 1967, in a turbulent period for the school, and quickly became a central figure in its English Department. He later directed the M.A program in creative writing and served as department chair for both English and Judaic Studies. Students experienced him as exacting but deeply committed - a teacher who demanded seriousness of purpose and treated their writing with the respect of a fellow writer. He loved to teach, and taught his last class the evening before his passing.

Professor Mirsky is survived by his wife, Inger Grytting, and by his children, Israel and Ruth