NEW YORK (AP) – Barbara Epstein, a founder and co-editor of The New York Review of Books who pushed for American distribution of “The Diary of Anne Frank” and edited the book’s original U.S. version, died Friday at age 76.

Epstein died of lung cancer at her Manhattan home, said Robert Silvers, her longtime co-editor at the book review.

For more than 40 years at the magazine, Epstein guided the work of literary luminaries such as Gore Vidal and Joyce Carol Oates. She left her mark on each piece, Silvers said.

“She had the very highest critical standard,” he said. “She never felt that the merely competent, the merely adequate, would do.”

Epstein, a Boston native, founded the magazine with a group that included Silvers, Robert Lowell and her then-husband, Jason Epstein, during a 1963 publishing strike that shut down The New York Times Book Review.

The first issue included work by Norman Mailer, W.H. Auden and Mary McCarthy, and was intended “to show what a good book review could be,” Silvers said. “Everyone wrote reviews in three weeks for no money.”

Early in her career, while a junior editor at Doubleday, Epstein pushed the publishing house to print the first American version of “Diary of a Young Girl,” the famed Holocaust account that later became known as “The Diary of Anne Frank,” Jason Epstein said.

“She said, ‘I think that I should publish it.’ And she did,” her ex-husband said. “She was a good editor and she could see what it was.”

Barbara Epstein edited the book, which was published in 1952, and developed a friendship with Otto Frank, Anne’s father, Jason Epstein said.

She often transformed a piece of writing with a few changes, said Luc Sante, an author who started his career as her assistant at the magazine, which appears every two weeks.

“It’s an extraordinarily rare talent, the ability to see the potential in the piece,” said Sante, who also has written for the review. “What Barbara was able to do was find what was missing.”

Although the two divorced in the 1980s, she and Jason Epstein remained close, speaking to each other daily, including throughout her illness, he said.

“She was honest, decent, kind, brilliant – all the things one would want a person to be,” he said.

For decades, each piece printed in the magazine was edited by both Epstein and Silvers. The surviving co-editor, also 76, said he plans to continue the job on his own.

Epstein is survived by a son, Jacob; a daughter, Helen; and three grandchildren.

Her longtime companion, Murray Kempton, a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for Newsday who also wrote for the New York Post, died in 1997.

AP-ES-06-16-06 2319EDT

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