Our Explorer of the New World

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"What I loved about Henry was his intelligence, his immediate grasp of all dimensions of the subject," says Lance Morrow, a writer Grunwald cultivated at TIME. "He improved stories by suggesting 10 new things you had not thought of." The range of his mind was legendary. As a young man, he would recite to his dates from T.S. Eliot. While rising at TIME, he managed to edit a compendium of critical writings about the author J.D. Salinger and another called Sex in America. One of our cherished legends about Henry describes his being told that a writer's cover story was hopelessly inadequate just as he was preparing to leave for the opera. He is said to have dictated a new version on the spot, all the while dressed in his opera cape.

Henry graduated to editor-in-chief of Time Inc. in 1979, supervising the editorial content of all our publications, including FORTUNE, SPORTS ILLUSTRATED, PEOPLE and MONEY. And after that? He was not the type to languish in retirement. In 1988 Ronald Reagan made him U.S. ambassador to Austria, allowing Henry to return in glory to the nation he had fled. His first task was to communicate Washington's displeasure with Austrian President Kurt Waldheim, a Nazi collaborator during the war.

In his last years, Henry suffered from macular degeneration, a disease of the retina that slowly deprived him of much of his sight but none of his drive. From that misfortune he produced Twilight: Losing Sight, Gaining Insight, an elegant and courageous memoir. And then, at the age of 81, he published his first work of fiction, A Saint, More or Less: A Novel. After the death of his first wife, Beverly, Grunwald remarried. His wife Louise was by his side last week, and his three children, Mandy, Lisa and Peter. Last year, after his cardiac episode, Lisa told him that he must have survived because he had something further he wanted to accomplish. "No," he told her. "I think I just love living." He did it very well. He left us with warm memories and the challenge of living up to his legacy.