Robert B. Silvers was born in 1929 in Mineola, New York. He graduated from the University of Chicago in 1947 and in 1950 worked as press secretary to Governor Chester Bowles of Connecticut. From 1953 to 1959 he lived in Paris, where he served with the US Army at SHAPE headquarters and attended the Sorbonne and the École des Sciences Politiques.

He joined the editorial board of The Paris Review in 1954 and became its Paris editor in 1956. From 1959 to 1963 he was an associate editor of Harper’s and the editor of the book Writing in America. In 1963 he helped found The New York Review of Books, which he co-edited for over forty years with Barbara Epstein (1928 – 2006); on Ms. Epstein’s death, in 2006, he became sole editor.

Mr. Silvers was the co-editor of The First Anthology: Thirty Years of The New York Review of Books 1963–1993 and the editor of, among other books, the widely praised essay collection Hidden Histories of Science and Doing It, a collection of essays on the performing arts. He is the co-editor of two volumes of The Company They Kept: Writers on Unforgettable Friendships, and of The New York Review Abroad: Fifty Years of International Reportage.

Mr. Silvers was a Trustee of The New York Public Library from 1997 until his death, and was also a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the board of directors of the American Ditchley Foundation as well as the Paris Review Foundation.

In 1988, he was named Chevalier de l’Ordre National du Mérite and in 1998 was named Chevalier de l’Ordre National de la Légion d’Honneur. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1996 and in 2007 was awarded the honorary degree of Doctor of Letters by Harvard University.

In 2006, together with Barbara Epstein, Robert B. Silvers was recognized by the National Book Foundation with the Literarian Award for Outstanding Service to the American Literary Community. In 2012, he received The Paris Review’s Hadada Prize for his unique contribution to literature, and was also awarded an inaugural New York City Literary Honor by Mayor Michael Bloomberg for his contribution to the literary life of the city. In 2012, President Barack Obama presented Mr. Silvers with the National Humanities Medal, granted by the National Endowment for the Humanities. In 2013 he received the Vergennes Award from the French-American Foundation.

Robert B. Silvers died after a brief illness on March 20, 2017, at the age of eighty-seven, shortly after the death of his companion, Lady Grace Dudley. They are buried together in Switzerland.