One day in 1966, not long after he wrote a scathingly funny review of Anya Seton’s novel “Avalon” in The New York Herald Tribune, David R. Slavitt arrived for lunch in Manhattan with the publisher Bernard Geis.
Mr. Slavitt was an up-and-coming poet and novelist with a preference for the classics. Mr. Geis specialized in the opposite: He had just hit it big with “Valley of the Dolls,” a salacious novel of sex and secrets by Jacqueline Susann.
Having thrilled at Mr. Slavitt’s work tearing down “Avalon,” Mr. Geis asked him to write his own “Valley of the Dolls.”
Mr. Slavitt protested. He said he had a “serious” novel, “Rochelle, or, Virtue Rewarded,” coming out later that year, and didn’t want to undermine it with something much lighter. Plus, he said, he was a highbrow author and translator of classical poetry, not a paperback hack.
But the chance to try a new genre was too tempting. He hit on a solution: writing under a pseudonym, Henry Sutton.
The result, “The Exhibitionist,” about an actress and her rich father, appeared in 1967. Tame by today’s standards, it was decried as near pornography. And it sold four million copies.
“It was every English major’s dream,” Mr. Slavitt told The Boston Globe in 2006. “I put my children though college and could continue to write poems and translate Ausonius, whom nobody has ever heard of.”
Mr. Slavitt, who died on May 17 at his home in Cambridge, Mass., was never one to be bound by genre — a valuable instinct for someone as prodigious as he was, with more than 130 works, including books of poetry and fiction, plays, and translations.
His wife, Janet Abrahm, confirmed his death.
The bulk of Mr. Slavitt’s work occupied the loftiest reaches of high culture. He translated Virgil, Ovid and Seneca, among many others. His poetry exhibited a mastery of traditional forms, though in a contemporary voice packed with wit and erudition.
“Though his stanza forms are often intricate, they never prevent, or even impede, the explorations of a mind that takes suggestions as they come, weaving them into the pattern,” wrote the critic Henry Taylor in his book “Compulsory Figures: Essays on Recent American Poets” (1992).
Mr. Slavitt wrote the libretto for an opera about the welfare system, based on a film by the documentarian Frederick Wiseman, a close friend, and a play, “King Saul,” which debuted Off Broadway in 1967.
And he wrote several other “serious” novels, including the comic “Anagrams” (1970), about a poet invited to speak at a literary festival where no one has read his work — a dig at what he called the “quality lit biz,” which he was both part of and felt slighted by, in its frequent ignorance of his work.
But the call of pulp fiction persisted. He wrote seven more novels as Henry Sutton, among them “The Proposal” (1980), about swinger culture. More books followed under more pseudonyms — he even borrowed the name of his first wife, Lynn Meyer, for a mystery novel, “Paperback Thriller” (1975).
“The theory was that it would be nice to make some kind of distinction between the two kinds of work, and the two kinds of audiences,” he said in an interview with Terry Gross in 1978. “When Longines makes a cheap watch for wide sale, they call it a Wittnauer.”
Under his own name, he wrote a bawdy “children’s” book — “The Cock Book, or, The Child’s First Book of Pornography” (1987), a satire of Dr. Seuss’s “One Fish, Two Fish” — and a memoir of his unsuccessful 2004 run for the Massachusetts State House of Representatives, “Blue State Blues: How a Cranky Conservative Launched a Campaign and Found Himself the Liberal Candidate (and Still Lost)” (2006).
Not even death precludes more of Mr. Slavitt’s titles from appearing, at least for now: His final book of poetry, “Last Words,” is slated for publication in 2028.
“I do what entertains me,” he told The Philadelphia Inquirer in 1996, adding that he was able to write so widely because “I have an absolute absence of any kind of fear.”
David Rytman Slavitt was born on March 23, 1935, in White Plains, N.Y., the son of Samuel Slavitt, a lawyer, and Adele (Rytman) Slavitt, her husband’s longtime secretary.
He was among the few Jewish students admitted at the time to Phillips Academy, the elite boarding school in Andover, Mass. He went on to study literature at Yale under the tutelage of another wide-ranging man of letters, Robert Penn Warren, and graduated in 1956.
The same year, he married Ms. Meyer; they divorced in 1977. He married Dr. Abrahm, a palliative care specialist, in 1978.
Along with her, he is survived by three children from his first marriage, Evan Slavitt, Sarah Bryce and Joshua Slavitt; nine grandchildren; and eight great-grandchildren.
Mr. Slavitt worked at Reader’s Digest, taught at the Georgia Institute of Technology and received a master’s degree in literature from Columbia University before joining the staff of Newsweek in 1958.
He gravitated to criticism and ended his time at the magazine, as a movie reviewer and editor, in 1965.
From then on, he was an independent writer, though he taught occasionally at the University of Maryland, Rutgers University and the University of Pennsylvania, among other schools.
His first book, “Suits for the Dead,” a collection of poems, appeared in 1961, while he was still at Newsweek.
Though he wrote fiction at the same rate that he turned out poetry, he considered himself a poet first and foremost, writing novels and ephemera on the side to make enough money to raise a family.
“If I had been in it just for the money,” he told The Philadelphia Inquirer, “I would’ve gone where the real money is: Business.”
Clay Risen is a Times reporter on the Obituaries desk.
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