Mr. Gelb was “a lanky creative tower of tension,” said Gay Talese, who worked under him as a metropolitan reporter. When Mr. Gelb was onto what he was sure would be a front-page story, “he’d get all excited,” Ms. Dowd said, “eyes going like a slot machine and arms like airplane propellers.”

His claims to juvenile shyness notwithstanding, Mr. Gelb’s self-image could also loom large. Once, when a friend jocularly likened him to Sol Hurok, the theater impresario, Mr. Gelb replied, half-jokingly: “Bigger.”

Arthur Neal Gelb was born on Feb. 3, 1924, in the back room of his parents’ dress shop in East Harlem. Both parents were Jewish immigrants from a border town in what was then Czechoslovakia and is now Ukraine. His father, Daniel, had settled on the Lower East Side of Manhattan and was a cigar maker before deciding to open the store and sell children’s dresses made by his wife, Fanny.

The family later moved to the Bronx, where, at DeWitt Clinton High School, in a class led by the revered teacher Irwin Guernsey (known as Doc), young Arthur was introduced to “The Front Page,” the newspaper melodrama by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur. He embraced Walter Burns, the play’s “cunning and unflappable” fictional managing editor, as his role model.

After dropping out of City College — he later graduated from New York University — he was hired by The Times as a $16-a-week copy boy in a time when “journalism,” he recalled, was considered a dirty word. (With World War II still raging, he was rejected by the Army for poor vision.)

Three days into the job, he persuaded editors to let him publish a weekly house organ about goings-on at the paper, which was then located on West 43rd Street. The venture insinuated him into the paper’s hierarchy as he pursued senior reporters, editors and executives for interviews. He was promoted rapidly.

On a foggy July 28, 1945, Mr. Gelb was enlisted to help cover the crash of a B-25 bomber into the Empire State Building. At Bellevue Hospital, he wrote later: “I managed to talk my way into the emergency room to ask the nurses some simple questions. Because of my youth and obvious inexperience, I guess they felt sorry for me, and they gave me a vivid account of their lifesaving efforts. My success alerted me unwittingly to a journalistic virtue: naïveté.”