Ben Sonnenberg

Benjamin "Ben" Sonnenberg, Jr. (December 30, 1936 – June 24, 2010) was an American publisher and the founder of the literary magazine Grand Street, which he began as a quarterly journal in 1981.

Sonnenberg was born on December 30, 1936, in Manhattan, the son of publicist Benjamin Sonnenberg, whose clients included such notables as Samuel Goldwyn, William S. Paley and David O. Selznick, in addition to major corporations. In his 1991 autobiography, Lost Property: Memoirs and Confessions of a Bad Boy, Sonnenberg recounted his childhood growing up in a five-story townhouse on Gramercy Park, where his father and his household staff of six entertained celebrities at regularly held dinner parties.

Sonnenberg started communicating in epigrams at age seven and started writing his memoirs at age 13, inspired by Giacomo Casanova's Histoire de ma vie. He ran through a series of unsuccessful experiences at various private schools and never finished high school. He never attended college, educating himself by reading and developing close relationships with writers Ted Hughes and W. S. Merwin.

With his father's wealth, he was able to travel around Europe in his 20s, living at times in London and Málaga.Jane Street, the first of three plays he wrote, was about two women living in a Greenwich Village apartment. The play lasted four nights Off-Off-Broadway.

He sold his father's 37-room townhouse in 1979 for $1.5 million, a building which The New York Times described as "often called the finest private house in New York City". He used the proceeds from the sale to support the creation of Grand Street, which was established as a journal in 1981 with a spirit similar to Horizon and The Dial and named after the street where his father grew up on Manhattan's Lower East Side.

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