Henry A. Grunwald of New York city and Vineyard Haven, an immigrant from Austria who rose from part-time copy boy at Time Magazine in 1945 to that publication's highest editorial post - managing editor - and who, ultimately, was editor in chief of all Time Inc. publications, died Feb. 26 at his New York home. He was 82.

In his long and fruitful life, Mr. Grunwald also wrote three books (two after his eyesight was severely affected by macular degeneration) and served as ambassador to Austria for two years in the 1980s - an unusual role for a Viennese Jew who had fled his then-Nazi country in 1940.

It was about 1960 that the portly, bespectacled editor and his first wife, Beverly Suser Grunwald, discovered Martha's Vineyard. Richard Murphy, a Time colleague who came to the Island, suggested that the Grunwalds try it.

"So we rented a house in Chilmark, and fell completely and totally in love with the place," Mr. Grunwald recalled in a Gazette interview.

But the family found they preferred down-Island summers, first renting on the Oak Bluffs side of Lagoon Pond before, in 1971, buying a house at the end of Lake Tashmoo that overlooked Vineyard Sound. Mr. Grunwald's wife and three children would spend the summer there while he commuted on weekends. He did, however, always spend three August weeks on the Island. Then he sunbathed and swam, walked the beach near his house, read books, played Scrabble and wrote. He tried as much as he could to escape the news of the world that so filled his work week.

In time, the Grunwalds bought a second house - a little two-bedroom cottage nearby that could be used for household help.

In 1981, Beverly Grunwald died. Her husband found it almost impossible to return to the house where they had shared so many happy times, and so, in the 1980s, he built another Tashmoo home. It was not to be big or fancy, but rather a simple cottage designed with "a special palette of woods," as his architect, the late Benjamin Thomson, described it. The shingles were cedar, the decks cypress, the floors hard ash and the doors and windows hard fir.

"He wanted it to look like an old-fashioned fishing shack where generations of Grunwald children had lived," builder Andrew Flake of Vineyard Haven recalled. "And he took a very active part in its building. A lot of people of his station have other people handling things like the construction of their houses, but he wanted to be involved. And he was always so gracious and polite - as well as being intellectually astounding, of course."

Although the house was somewhat altered after his 1987 marriage to Louise Melhado, it continued to be his favorite getaway. He and his wife spent the first part of each summer at Southampton on Long Island, but every August they returned to the Vineyard, where Mr. Grunwald watched the sun set over the Sound, strolled the shore in search of beach glass, swam and read and wrote. The Grunwalds did limited entertaining at small dinner parties. They invited such old friends as William and Rose Styron, the Mike Wallaces, Diane Sawyer and her husband Mike Nichols, Beverly Sills and her husband Peter Greenough, the Vernon Jordans and Linda Fairstein and her husband Justin Feldman. And there was also one big Island bash for all other friends.

Heinz Anatole Grunwald was born Dec. 3, 1922, in Vienna, Austria, the son of Alfred Grunwald, a librettist who had written several Viennese operetta, and Mila Lowenstein Grunwald. During World War II, the family fled Austria for, first, Czechoslovakia, then France, Morocco and Portugal before finally reaching New York.

There, 17-year-old Henry, already interested in writing, started a high school magazine. For awhile he was tempted to enter his father's field of librettos and he did write a few comedies, "but writing plays didn't quite fit my personality," he told the Gazette in 1975. Soon after he reached New York University, he was editing that school's newspaper. Then, in 1945, he got his part-time copy boy job at Time.

He never left.

He recalled to the Gazette how he read the copy he was carrying from floor to floor with a critical eye. "I saw some stories I thought were good. Others didn't seem so great." And so he began to try rewriting some of what he was reading. Finally 18 months after his arrival at the magazine, he had his first article printed.

"It was about a Russian scientific experiment - something that really interested me at the time." After a few more such articles, he was hired as a writer. From 1945 to 1951 he wrote in the foreign news department under the virulently anti-Communist Whitaker Chambers. Then - when Mr. Grunwald was only 28 - he became the youngest senior editor in the magazine's history.

"He was a remarkably talented writer, gracious but excruciatingly demanding as an editor, an extraordinary man in every way," recalled former Time book review editor and Chilmark seasonal resident Timothy Foote. "He also had an amazing memory. In 1952, as a part-time college stringer at Harvard, I was asked to work on a Henry project - Women in America. I went out to Wellesley and interviewed about 20 women who explained they didn't want to be labeled ‘housewives' as their mothers had been. As it turned out, the story didn't run, but Henry liked the file and let me know it, and 30 years later, when he was editor in chief of the whole company, he sent it back to me."

Always on the plump side, Mr. Grunwald ate with relish, though, in the Time Magazine dining room, he would make occasional overtures to dieting by requesting a single apple for his dessert. In recent Island summers, he had also been taking yoga lessons with an instructor in an effort to reduce his weight and increase his well-being.

It was President Ronald Reagan who, after Mr. Grunwald had spent eight years in charge of Time Inc., asked him if he would like to be ambassador to the country of his birth. He accepted and thoroughly enjoyed all the panoply of the post, but he was ambassador at the time that Kurt Waldhein, Austrian president, was under attack for his activities in the German Army in World War II. Mr. Grunwald agreed to see him at official functions, but would have nothing to do with him beyond those. Asked once if he was pleased to be going back to his native country, he replied that he was pleased to be going back to the country of his birth - as an American.

When he returned from his Vienna posting, he wrote his first memoir - personal recollections of having been a refugee. His second memoir, written in 1999, dealt with the progressive loss of his sight. In 2003, he published his first novel.

Mr. Grunwald is remembered by his friends as a man of brilliance, wit and urbanity.

In the days of the parlor game Who Are You? in which you listed in order of importance the first three identifying things that came into your mind about yourself, Mr. Grunwald's reply was "First, I am a father. Then I am a Jew. Then I am the managing editor of Time."

Mr. Grunwald is survived by his wife and three children by his first wife. They are Mandy, of Washington, D.C., Lisa Grunwald Adler of Manhattan, and Peter, also of Manhattan; a stepson, Bob Savitt of Greenwich, Conn., and four grandchildren.

A funeral service was held Tuesday in New York. Donations in his memory may be made to the International Rescue Committee, 122 E. 42nd street, New York, N.Y. 10168, or to Lighthouse International, 111 East 59th street, New York, N.Y. 10022.