#ed fancher

[20th-century-scrapbook]

The founders of the alternative paper, The Village Voice, Ed Fancher, center, Norman Mailer, left, and Dan Wolf. Mr. Mailer, already a well-known novelist, wrote a column for The Voice but left after a few months.Credit...Gene Pauler

The Voice stuck largely to its local turf at first, Greenwich Village and New York City. But it soon expanded its journalistic ambitions citywide and nationally, becoming the most influential and successful alternative weekly in the United States. Its lively and provocative articles, essays, columns and criticism covering politics, civil rights, the women’s movement, sex and the arts created an idiosyncratic brand that was widely imitated.

[20th-century-personalities]

The psychologist Ed Fancher in 1957, two years after he and Norman Mailer and Dan Wolf founded the alternative paper The Village Voice.Credit...via Fancher Family.

In a city brimming with daily newspapers, The Voice found its niche as an alternative newsweekly in the bohemian culture of Greenwich Village, where another weekly, The Villager, had been publishing since the 1930s.

“We were crazy enough to think it would succeed,” Mr. Fancher said in an interview for this obituary in 2018. “It was absolutely nutty, but we were all World War II vets who had survived, and that had a lot to do with our optimism that — goddamn it! — we were going to make it.”