WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. —  Joan Simpson Burns, one of America’s most persistent diarists, died this past Wednesday in the splendid isolation of her home in the hills overlooking Williamstown, Massachusetts. She was 93. Born in 1927 to celebrity paleontologist George Gaylord Simpson, she spent the restless energy issued from her traumatic childhood finding life and love with literary luminaries of her generation in post-war Greenwich Village. Her apartments on Fifteenth and Grove Streets regularly provided respite for Howard Nemerov, James Dickey, Saul Bellow, Irving Kristol, B. F. Skinner, and many others in the 1950s and 60s, just as the Williamstown home she shared for decades with Pulitzer-prize winning historian James MacGregor Burns was the site of vivid dialogue with a stream of visiting cultural icons, including Ted Kennedy, Howard Zinn, John Kenneth Galbraith, Harold Brodkey, Robert Morris, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Joan Robinson, Dick Higgins, Arakawa, Tom Krens, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., and hundreds more. After a prenuptial visit to the White House in 1965, President Johnson wrote to her, “MacGregor has chosen well.” The dozens of artists and writers she mentored throughout her life would agree with LBJ; student protégées of MacGregor’s like presidential hisorian Michael Beschloss would have starved without her constant care.

In 1938, in the thick of a tabloid divorce, pre-teen Joan and her younger sister Elizabeth were abducted by their mother and anonymously sequestered in a Canadian convent. After a year of searching, the FBI returned the children to their father, back from fieldwork in Venezuela and now a curator at the American Museum of Natural History. At first and last a visual artist (she made a mock-up for a book cover in 2021), Burns attended New York’s High School of Music & Art and then the universities of Connecticut and Michigan, where she held a first job in radio while testing herself for what would be her primary vocation as poet, writer and editor.

After a few months of impetuous marriage to a cowboy in New Mexico, Joan returned to NYC around 1948, marrying film-maker Alfred Lee Meyers, the father of her two children and brother of historian Marvin Meyers. Marvin brought her into the circle of New York Intellectuals and Irving Kristol became her most important mentor. The again single mother supported her family as an editor at Basic Books and Harcourt Brace, serving as Managing Editor of the Readers' Subscription Book Club and book editor for Special Projects at CBS, where she would produce the best-selling John F. Kennedy: As We Remember Him. In 1960 she was briefly Managing Editor of the Partisan Review, publishing Syvia Plath and Mary McCarthy. Her own promising Poetry and a Libretto appeared in Alan Swallow’s New Poetry Series. Prolific observer, some of her many interviews are archived at the Columbia Center for Oral History Research, from which material she wrote a unique study of “culture managers” that was published as The Awkward Embrace: The Creative Artist and the Institution in America by Knopf in 1975. Burns and George Whitaker — the discoverer of fossils at Georgia O’Keefe’s Ghost Ranch in New Mexico — together wrote Dinosaur Hunt for young adults.

During the 1980s, her most active period in Williamstown, Burns created the Highgate Art Trust to incite collaborations between artists, scholars, and cultural entrepreneurs, producing in addition to many events the limited edition collection Critical Relations: Word/Image. This inspirational group joined Thomas Krens for a first tour of the vacant factories that would become the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA) a decade later. With Savannah, Georgia, artist Thom Maher she created a monumental artist’s book exploring Paul Valéry’s Le Cimetière Marin.

A lifelong Democrat and co-President of the local League of Women Voters, Burns intensified her civic engagement as an elected Selectman, also sitting on the Zoning Board of Appeals, the Housing Authority, and a wide range of development committees. Williamstown’s center was shaped by her ideas; she was a powerful advocate for affordable housing and a food project in nearby North Adams. For a while, local access TV broadcast “Citizens in League,” an interview show she produced and hosted.

Always vivacious and colorful, in her final decade she married again. Her last and constant companion was Lt. Colonel Ruben William Shay, Special Forces Airborne, a highly decorated Jewish German refugee from the Holocaust and son of Rudolf Schay, a prominent anti-Hitler journalist of the Weimar period who communicated from the global front against fascism with FDR’s White House and spied on the Japanese occupation forces in Manila for General MacArthur’s Southwest Pacific Command.

Not to be outdone by her descendants, in 2019 Joan designed and had crafted the headstone meant to mark her final resting place. The declaration “She and life considered one another” is engraved on one side. Just after “Born September 20, 1927” she required the stone-carver to add the words “Died in the twenty-first century.” Then her family assembled with her to record its premature, forever premature, placement. Her papers, together with one hundred and thirty volumes of her commonplace book and journal, will be housed at the Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America at Harvard.

Of the four daughters of George Gaylord Simpson, Joan was predeceased by Elizabeth Léonie Simpson and Patricia Gaylord Simpson. Her older sister, Helen Simpson Vishniac, passed away just one day later. She is survived by daughter Trienah Ann Meyers of Daytona Beach, Florida, and son Peter Alexander Meyers of Princeton, New Jersey, together with grandchildren Jacob Alexander Gorman and Alexander Andrew Meyers. Joan Simpson Burns is likewise survived by admirers far and wide, as most of her detractors had the good taste to die in time to allow her some final years of peace.