Stephan Salisbury, retired longtime senior cultural writer for The Inquirer, has died at 77

Stephan Salisbury, 77, of Swarthmore, retired longtime senior cultural writer for The Inquirer, essayist, and author, died Saturday, July 20, of lung cancer at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania.

The owner of a master’s degree in poetry from the Columbia University School of the Arts and the son of Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter, editor, and author Harrison Salisbury, Stephan Salisbury fashioned a 43-year career at The Inquirer that featured hundreds of influential stories about Philadelphia’s art and culture, and the people who shaped them. He first covered cultural life for the paper in 1989 and, until he retired in 2022, focused as much on the newsmakers as the culture they created.

He reported extensively on the early development of Broad Street’s Avenue of the Arts in the 1990s and wrote for three decades about the local cultural community’s efforts to fundraise, attract new patrons, and grapple with the real-world results of America’s ever-present culture wars.

“He cared deeply about the arts,” said Inquirer staff writer Peter Dobrin, “and the role the arts served in explaining humanity to itself.”

Mr. Salisbury developed dozens of news sources around the region over four decades, and he used word cadence and a colorful vocabulary to tell his tales. “The sound of language was important to him,” said his wife, Jennifer Baker. “He worked really hard at his writing. He cared about the concept of journalism and the news.”

In 1994, Mr. Salisbury described then-Mayor Ed Rendell as being “flanked by dark-suited corporate executives seated in high-backed chairs” during a news conference. In 1993, he noted the city planned to cut funds to cultural organizations and said: “It’s not that the Rendell administration lacks a sense of history. It just doesn’t want to pay for it.”

His exclusive reporting uncovered missteps and resulted in the development of the President’s House Site at Independence National Historical Park, and prevented the relocation of The Gross Clinic painting and Dream Garden glass mosaic. “I truly believe if it weren’t for his crusading reporting, some of Philadelphia’s greatest cultural landmarks would have been sold and spirited away from the city,” longtime friend John Thornton said in a video about Mr. Salisbury.

He joined The Inquirer’s city desk staff in 1979 and wrote for a decade about neighborhood life, Pennsylvania prisons, and civil unrest in Philadelphia and around the world. He won awards for his coverage and was part of an Inquirer team that was a 1995 finalist for a Pulitzer Prize.

“Notable for crisp and revealing reporting, clear and elegant writing, and deep erudition, Stephan’s work was its own high art,” said Gabriel Escobar, editor and senior vice president of The Inquirer. “Our readers were the beneficiaries over many years.”

He became an expert on security issues and anti-Muslim sentiment after 9/11, and wrote 2010′s Mohamed’s Ghosts: An American Story of Love and Fear in the Homeland about the anti-Arab hysteria he witnessed. In 2011, he won the Courage in Journalism Award from the Philadelphia chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations for “reporting on civil rights and his authorship of Mohamed’s Ghosts.”

His novel, Britt & Jimmy Strike Out, was published in 2018, and reviewer R.P. Finch wrote in The Inquirer that it was both a “dark and deeply cautionary dystopian novel of extrapolation” and a “vivid, ingenious, and very funny novel.” He coedited and contributed to Individual Rights in the Corporation: A Reader on Employee Rights in 1980, and reviewed books and plays for The Inquirer.

He also posted a satirical blog called CSI: American Carnage, and said on his website that it is “a daily report on the American state, everything from the arrangement of the deck chairs to steering into an iceberg.” Dobrin said: “There may never be another arts reporter like Stephan Salisbury. He was the total package. He was both a great reporter and great writer.”

Stephan Percy Salisbury was born March 20, 1947, in Mamaroneck, N.Y. He went to boarding school in Connecticut and earned a bachelor’s degree at Columbia University’s Columbia College in 1969 and a master’s degree in 1974.

He had an early wide world view and protested against the Vietnam War in 1968. He worked for a while as a young man at the New York Times, publishing companies in New York, and Daily Variety in Los Angeles before joining The Inquirer.

He married artist Jennifer Baker in 1989, and they had a daughter, Mollie, and a son, Nathaniel. They lived in Philadelphia and then Swarthmore, and stole away every summer to vacation in Cape Cod.

He favored tweed jackets, colorful sweaters, and eye-catching socks, and his low-key demeanor prompted a former colleague to describe him as “cheerfully gloomy.” He liked to watch baseball games on TV, sit quietly with his cats, read, and check in on the news often.

“He had a wonderful lighthearted and witty silliness,” his son said. His daughter said: “I will miss his insight and humor, his understanding, and his gentle kindness.”

In addition to his wife and children, Mr. Salisbury is survived by his brother, Michael, a granddaughter, and other relatives.

A celebration of his life is to be at 2 p.m. Sunday, Sept. 15, at the Ethical Society, 1906 Rittenhouse Square, Philadelphia, Pa. 19103.