The exacting editor of The New York Review of Books, Robert B Silvers, who made it a literary magazine of lasting influence, has died aged 87. He died at his home in Manhattan after a short illness, the magazine said.

Silvers co-edited the bi-weekly with Barbara Epstein from its inception in 1963. It regularly featured contributions from great writers and polemicists like Gore Vidal, Norman Mailer, WH Auden and more recently Zadie Smith.

In a tweet The New York Review of Books wrote: “With great sadness we must announce that Robert B Silvers, founding editor of The New York Review, died this morning after a short illness.” It provided no further details, and is yet to announce a successor. Silvers had served as sole editor of the NYRB since 2006.

By the end of his long and storied life, he had become a landmark of the New York literary scene.

“Ambitious novelists would hope to see him at their book launches, his genial presence often viewed as conferring acceptance into an exclusive club,” says the BBC’s Nick Bryant in New York. However, the magazine was not without its critics. Writer Tom Wolfe mocked it as “the chief theoretical organ of Radical Chic”.