A memorial gathering will be held next month for Bernard Taper, a former Chronicle and New Yorker magazine staff writer who put words to paper with uncommon grace and skill and who, as a professor, inspired countless UC Berkeley students to try it themselves.

He covered choreographers, chess masters, heads of state and religious hustlers. After a spin through his manual typewriter, all such folk invariably turned out to be worth reading about.

Mr. Taper died Oct. 17 of a bacterial infection in his Berkeley home at the age of 98.

A native of London, Mr. Taper came to the U.S. alone on a freighter at the age of 11. He earned a bachelor’s degree from UC Berkeley and a master’s degree in creative writing from Stanford. He used many of those skills during his reporting career at The Chronicle, from 1950 to 1955.

In a 1955 feature story about a sold-out concert at the Cow Palace by a showy young pianist named Liberace, Mr. Taper wrote: “The multitude laughed at his most casual attempt at humor and it applauded every time he gave the slightest intimation that applause would be welcome — often.” After inquiring about Liberace’s effect on his audience’s well-being, Mr. Taper was able to report that “San Mateo Deputy Sheriff Frank Martin said there were eight faintings, two epileptic fits and one convulsion.’’

Chronicle Science Editor Dave Perlman, who worked with Mr. Taper six decades ago, fondly recalled his old colleague as a “wonderfully literate reporter” from The Chronicle’s classic period.

In 1956, Mr. Taper joined the staff of the New Yorker, where he remained for three decades and, with his friend and former Chronicle reporter Kevin Wallace, wrote countless Talk of the Town stories. Mr. Taper profiled 14-year-old chess prodigy Bobby Fischer; the first prime minister of Ghana, Kwame Nkrumah; cellist Pablo Casals; and Broadway producer Jerome Robbins.

In 1963, he expanded a series of his profiles of choreographer George Balanchine into a best-selling biography, considered the definitive account of the great Russian man of dance.

His 1959 story about the fraud trial of flamboyant Oakland evangelist C. Thomas Patten captured that man’s excesses in one oft-repeated turn of phrase. Describing Patten on the stand, Mr. Taper wrote that he “lolled back in the witness chair until it was tipped at a most precarious angle — as if in this regard, as in all others, he was trying to see just how far he could go.”

An intense man with a dry sense of humor who did his own share of lolling back, Mr. Taper enjoyed playing tennis and squash and, in later years, tried his hand at cooking after discovering that the last of his three wives didn’t enjoy it.

He was a second lieutenant in the U.S. Army during World War II and, immediately after it ended, became one of the “monuments men” charged with the duty of recovering paintings and sculptures looted by the Nazis. He found many such works, his son Mark recalled, “but he was always obsessed with the Raphael that got away.”

In 1970, he joined the faculty of the Graduate School of Journalism at UC Berkeley, where he was best known for teaching a class on the writing of profiles and short biographies. Countless students regarded his intense and inspirational class as the highlight of their college years. Mr. Taper, smiling from beneath a tangle of silver hair, could deftly wield a red editing pencil. He was also generous when he found something worth praising — often.

Mr. Taper was a patron of the California Shakespeare Theater, which he helped to found in 1973. In the company’s early days, the plays were performed in a Berkeley hills park not far from Mr. Taper’s home, and he attended regularly.

“My dad always said his job was to make the writer invisible,” his son said, although Mr. Taper’s stories were not of that kind. “And he had a gift for enjoying himself. He got his money’s worth. You might say he bluffed his way through life and then followed through.”

Mr. Taper is survived by his wife, poet Gwen Head of Berkeley, and his son, Mark, of Bozeman, Mont.

Steve Rubenstein is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: srubenstein@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @SteveRubeSF