Robert Emmett Ginna Jr., a reporter, editor, filmmaker, and teacher, died at home in Sag Harbor on March 3 at the age of 99. Twenty-five years earlier, when he was 74, he strapped on a 38-pound rucksack and set off to walk the length of Ireland. The journey became a book, “The Irish Way: A Walk Through Ireland’s Past and Present.” Illustrated with his own sketches, it was just one chapter in a lifetime of adventuring in words and images, working in art museums, magazine and book publishing, television, and film.
Mr. Ginna was also a magazine journalist. He wrote one of the first major media stories on U.F.O.s for Life magazine and later became a founding editor of People. As an independent filmmaker, he produced movies with figures such as John Ford, Peter O’Toole, David Niven, and Maggie Smith.
It was magazines, indirectly, that brought him to Sag Harbor. As a Life magazine reporter, he met Margaret Williams, one of a number of Time Incorporated staffers who bought homes in the village in the 1950s. He pursued her for several years, and married her in 1958. They both loved Sag Harbor and moved there full time after the birth of their second child. When Mr. Ginna shifted careers to become a filmmaker, he maintained an office for many years over Marty’s Barbershop on Main Street.
A close friend, the writer James Salter, devoted several pages of his own memoir, “Burning the Days,” to their ups and downs together in the movie business, writing, “As a producer, Ginna may have had limitations. He was scrupulously honest. He was a classicist — his interests were cultural, his knowledge large — and unequivocal in his statements and beliefs.”
Mr. Ginna’s friends included a wide range of East End writers, publishers, and artists, among them John Steinbeck, Shana Alexander, Peter Matthiessen, Jules Feiffer, and his Sag Harbor neighbor Bob Loomis, who edited his book on Ireland. Mr. Ginna was widowed in 2004. For several years, until her death in 2020, he was a companion of the writer Gail Sheehy.
Born in Brooklyn on Dec. 3, 1925, to Robert Emmett Ginna, an electrical engineer and later chairman of Rochester Gas and Electric, and Margaret McCall Ginna, he grew up in Rochester and was admitted to Harvard, but left there to serve in the Navy’s Pacific fleet in World War II. After his naval service he graduated from the University of Rochester in 1948. Hoping to pursue medical research, he began working in a Rochester laboratory, but while traveling in France, he had an “epiphany,” as he called it, gazing at the Rose Window in Chartres Cathedral: a sudden realization that he should make his life in the arts.
Mr. Ginna took a master’s degree in art history at Harvard, then served briefly as curator of painting and sculpture at the Newark Museum. But following his interest in writing, he joined Life in 1950. Later in the 1950s he held editorial positions at Scientific American and the arts magazine Horizon. As a writer, Robert Emmett Ginna’s byline appeared, between the 1940s and the 2010s, in a score of magazines and newspapers, including The American Scholar, Boston magazine, Condeé Nast Traveler, Connoisseur, Entertainment Weekly, Esquire, The New York Times, The Saturday Evening Post, and Yankee.
A love of Ireland, and of Irish culture, was a constant in Mr. Ginna’s life. After serving as on-air interviewer of the Irish playwright Sean O’Casey for “Wisdom,” an NBC series featuring conversations with leading cultural figures, Mr. Ginna joined the series as a producer. This led him into independent producing for TV and film. His first feature film, in 1965, was “Young Cassidy,” drawn from O’Casey’s autobiography.
Mr. Ginna’s other movies included “Brotherly Love,” a drama starring Peter O’Toole and Susannah York, and “Before Winter Comes,” starring David Niven, Anna Karina, and the Israeli actor Topol. As a producer, Mr. Ginna showed a keen eye for talent, casting future luminaries such as Maggie Smith and John Hurt early in their careers. He also co-wrote, with his Sag Harbor friend and neighbor John Sherry, the western “The Last Challenge.”
In 1973 Mr. Ginna returned to Time Inc. as a founding editor of People, where he commissioned and edited profiles of such authors as Graham Greene and Vladimir Nabokov. But People rapidly moved away from such elevated fare, and, dismayed with its increasing emphasis on what he viewed as celebrity fluff, he moved into book publishing in 1975 as a senior editor at Little, Brown and Company. There too he succeeded as a talent-spotter, acquiring “Coma,” a medical thriller by Dr. Robin Cook, which launched Dr. Cook’s career as a major thriller author. (Mr. Ginna was proudest of the more literary and scholarly books that made up more of his list, such as Robert Nye’s “Falstaff” and James Salter’s “Solo Faces,” having persuaded Salter to transform an unproduced screenplay into the novel.)
He soon became editor in chief of Little, Brown, and later spoke of that as the most satisfying of his many jobs. Nonetheless, in 1980 he was enticed back to Time Inc. for one more stint, as the company attempted to revive Life, where Mr. Ginna had made his start in the magazine industry’s golden age. The new monthly Life could not overcome the headwinds already buffeting print publications in the 1980s, however, and soon ceased regular publication.
Mr. Ginna began teaching writing and film courses at Harvard University in 1987 and found that he loved the classroom; he taught there for several years. Invited to establish an academic press at New England College in Henniker, N.H., he did so in 2006, while also teaching writing there. In the summer of 2009, he began teaching in the annual Writers Conference at Stony Brook Southampton, soon joining the faculty of its M.F.A. program in creative writing and literature.
In 2016, at 90, Mr. Ginna retired from teaching but continued to pursue both writing and filmmaking. At his death he left an uncompleted memoir titled “Epiphanies,” and he strove — unsuccessfully, but with energy and optimism — to develop a film based on Sean O’Casey’s classic play “The Shadow of a Gunman,” working with the director Terry George — another Sag Harborite.
Mr. Ginna’s first marriage, to Patricia Ellis, ended in divorce.
He is survived by the children he had with Margaret Williams Ginna, Peter St. John Ginna of Sag Harbor and Mary Frances Williams (Molly) Ginna of Riverhead. He is also survived by a sister, Margretta Michie of Rochester, two grandchildren, Henry Hewitt Ginna and Katharine Williams Ginna, and a great-grandson, Colin Robert Ginna.
His funeral will be held at 11 a.m. on Monday — a day he would have approved of, St. Patrick’s Day — at St. Andrew Catholic Church in Sag Harbor.
