Lear deBessonet, the new artistic director of Lincoln Center Theater, has chosen “Ragtime” as her first show.

Robert Benton, the Oscar-winning filmmaker who helped reset the rules of Hollywood as co-creator of “Bonnie and Clyde,” and later wrote and directed the sensitive domestic dramas “Kramer vs.

Jason Epstein, a publishing innovator and bon vivant who helped put the classics in paperback, co-founded The New York Review of Books and worked with such novelists as E.