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Walter Edwards Sublette, Playboy fiction editor, Aurora professor

Walter Edwards Sublette was Playboy magazine’s assistant fiction editor for seven years and a freelance writer before launching a career as an educator at Aurora University, where he was a tenured communications professor and an artist in residence.

Mr. Sublette, 74, died of heart failure Thursday, Sept. 18, at Imperial Nursing Home, said his wife of 40 years, Cheryl Gorman Sublette. A longtime resident of Chicago’s Hollywood Park neighborhood, Mr. Sublette had battled ailments for more than 20 years after undergoing heart bypass surgery in 1991, she said.

Born in Chicago, Mr. Sublette grew up in Oak Lawn and graduated from Oak Lawn Community High School in 1958. He played trombone in his high school band and harbored dreams of a career as a professional trombonist, moving to New York City as a young man for a year to perform in a jazz band.

Mr. Sublette earned a bachelor’s degree from the University of Illinois at Chicago and later entered UIC’s fiction writing program, from which he earned a master’s degree in 1977.

During much of the 1960s, Mr. Sublette focused on his own writing. In 1964, he penned a novel about contemporary interracial romance in Old Town, “Go Now in Darkness,” under the nom de plume S.W. Edwards. He also did some work for Chicago magazine in its early years.

Through his studies, Mr. Sublette met Playboy fiction editor Robie Macauley, who hired Mr. Sublette as the magazine’s assistant fiction editor in 1970.

“What I remember about Walter is that he was very serious and really loved his work,” said Suzanne McNear, a colleague at Playboy and now an author living in Sag Harbor, N.Y. “He was really, really caring and precise and wrote wonderful comments about whatever it was that was coming up in our departments.”

While at Playboy, Mr. Sublette read piles of manuscripts and arranged for the magazine to publish fiction from major authors, such as Joyce Carol Oates, as well as budding ones.

“It was my dad’s job to weed out the promising stories from the duds, as well as edit them down to entice a commercial audience,” said Mr. Sublette’s daughter Stacey.

Mr. Sublette impressed his colleagues with his love of classical music.

“I remember a time in my office when he tried to show me the subtleties of symphonic orchestral conducting,” said retired Playboy editorial director Arthur Kretchmer.

After a reorganization of Playboy’s staff in 1977, Mr. Sublette left but he remained a contributing editor for a short time. He briefly moved to New York for a job at Penthouse magazine.

From the late 1970s until the late 1980s, Mr. Sublette worked as a freelance writer. In 1980, he published a book of poetry, “Resurrection on Friday Night.” In a May 1980 Tribune review, reviewer John Jacob wrote that “when these poems work, they work because they tell stories.”

Mr. Sublette wrote for several trade publications, including Future Pro and Restaurant Hospitality. He also wrote several book reviews for the Tribune.

In the late 1980s, Mr. Sublette went back to graduate school to pursue a doctoral degree. He attended Northern Illinois University and, despite a host of health problems brought on by his heart bypass surgery in 1991, completed his doctorate in 1993. Mr. Sublette then joined Aurora University as an associate professor. Mr. Sublette also founded Aurora’s Learning Center and a literary publication, the AU Review.

Mr. Sublette brought a certain style to Aurora’s campus, his daughter said.

“He was famous for wearing eccentric, colorful shirts, brandishing a cane with a brass horse-head handle and cheerfully cruising onto campus in a cream-colored 1984 Cadillac Seville he affectionately dubbed ‘Candy Cadillac,’ ” she said. “With his big personality and magnetism, he inspired others to take up creative writing and be inspired to let their imagination flow, and think of writing and creativity as positive opportunities until his retirement from there.”

The university promoted him to full professor in 2000. He retired from Aurora in 2009.

A first marriage ended in divorce. In addition to his wife and daughter, Mr. Sublette is survived by two other daughters, Sherine and Suzanne; and a sister, Wanda Sublette Garofalo.

Services were held.