“He was taller than me,” said Philip Gourevitch, when asked about his height compared to the late George Plimpton, who stood 6 feet 4 inches. The newly minted successor to the editorship of the Paris Review stands 6 feet, though his wavy black hair and serious mien make him seem taller. Daniel Kunitz, a former Paris Review managing editor, describes both men as having an imposing presence, though the silver-haired Plimpton was “more reedlike.”

Physical stature might seem the only thing this New Yorker writer shares with his legendarily colorful predecessor. Mr. Gourevitch, 43, is known for his incisive reporting on the Rwandan genocide; Plimpton, who died in 2003 at the age of 76, though not averse to serious reporting himself, also wrote children’s books, had a lion tamer’s chair on the ceiling, served as fireworks commissioner, and kept a regular table at Elaine’s.

The two first met in 1999, while attending a Hemingway Centennial symposium in Boston. Word had spread that Plimpton was hosting a party in his room at the Copley Hotel, inspiring conference participants to raid their minibars and show up. “Somehow,” Mr. Gourevitch recalled, “Plimpton had a proper bar.” At the party, the two men talked about bird watching and Plimpton’s travels in Zaire (now Congo).

The Paris Review offers an annual prize, a statuette in the shape of Plimpton’s favorite bird, the hadada, an ibis found in Africa. Asked if he had seen one before, Mr. Gourevitch joked, “I think it’s clearly why I got the job.”

A co-editor of the New York Review of Books, Robert Silvers, who led the search committee, begs to differ. He said the committee perceived in Mr. Gourevitch very strong judgment, and particularly, a clarity of mind. Mr. Silvers said that like Plimpton, Mr. Gourevitch possessed a confidence and openness to ask, “Why not?” The committee also liked that Mr. Gourevitch saw the magazine could incorporate new elements, for example, that the journal’s famous interview could also “be involved in different kinds of conversations.” As Mr. Gourevitch explained it to the Sun, “There are ways to include more than the two main voices in interviews, by bringing in comments and questions of other writers and editors who are involved with the subject in an oral-history style.”

Mr. Gourevitch is accustomed to unusual perspectives. As a first-generation American in a family that fled Nazism and fascist occupied Europe, Mr. Gourevitch’s childhood in Middletown, Conn., was equal parts Norman Rockwell Americana (lots of lawn mowing, for instance) and 1960s college-town laissez-faire (as a boy he lobbied to attend the experimental “open classroom” at the elementary school Wilbur Snow, named for a poet-lobsterman from Maine). His mother is a painter of skyscapes; his father an emeritus philosophy professor at Wesleyan University who translated Rousseau and instilled in his son a passion for literature and books by, among other things, reading Herodotus aloud on a family vacation in Greece.

As a high-school student at Choate, the senior dean once complained, “Gourevitch wears his alienation on his sleeve,” but gave him a big hug when he returned to speak to graduating seniors last year. While at Cornell, he took a semester off that ended up lasting three years. For a while he tended bar and delivered rural papers to farmers outside Ithaca, until the car got totaled and he couldn’t continue the job.

It was around this time that George Packer, today a New Yorker staff writer, first met Mr. Gourevitch. It was the winter of 1984, and Mr. Packer had just returned to Boston from the Peace Corps. Both men answered the same advertisement for a construction crew laborer. “We spent a few days side by side rolling paint on walls,” Mr. Packer recalled. “I have to admit, my first impression of Philip underestimated him: He needed a haircut, he seemed to be about two years past his due date in graduating [college], and he was writing fiction, which always sounds dubious. After a week they gave the job to me, and the last thing Philip said was, ‘You got my job, bub.'”

Years later, when Mr. Packer began seeing Mr. Gourevitch’s name in national publications, attached to deep and brilliant reporting, he had to confront one of two possibilities: either it was a different Gourevitch or he had misjudged him. They became close friends after meeting again in 1999 for the first time in 15 years. Upon hearing the news of his editorship, Mr. Packer was thrilled for him and told him, “You’ve got your job, bub.”

After belatedly completing college, Mr. Gourevitch spent a year in the graduate writing program at Washington University in St. Louis, and then returned to New York, where he worked alongside the sculptor Robert Lobe, hammering sheet metal over rocks and trees. In a kind of Left Bank touch, he even lived for a while on a tugboat docked at the North Moore Street pier.

In 1989, Mr. Gourevitch enrolled in Columbia’s M.F.A. program. Recalling his former student, Phillip Lopate described Mr. Gourevitch as a mature young man. (“He probably didn’t know how old I was,” Mr. Gourevitch told the Sun.) Mr. Lopate said, “He was writing fiction in somewhat of an intellectual Saul Bellow manner and I counseled him that I thought he had a wonderful full-throated nonfiction voice and that he should basically give up fiction and become a nonfiction writer, which he did.”

Mr. Gourevitch became nonfiction editor of the graduate writing program’s literary journal, “Columbia: A Journal of Literature & Art,” and compiled a themed issue on Czechoslovakian writers after the Velvet Revolution of 1989. When Mr. Lopate told him the Forward was starting in English, he interviewed with its then editor Seth Lipsky, who asked if he had ever done reporting before. When Mr. Gourevitch admitted he hadn’t, Mr. Lipsky responded, “Good. No bad habits,” and gave him the job. Mr. Gourevitch filed stories on Crown Heights, and experienced “how strange it was to commute by subway to a riot.” He worked at the Forward for two and a half years.

Mr. Gourevitch’s first foreign reporting assignment was for Outside magazine, for which he wrote about the extinction of tigers in Siberia. It was while writing for Granta, then under the editorship of Bill Buford, that he first began to explore his current style of in-depth reporting combining politics, history, morality, and individual story collecting. Mr. Buford was subsequently hired by Tina Brown at the New Yorker, and brought Mr. Gourevitch on board to cover the Rwandan genocide. Based on that reporting, in 1998 Mr. Gourevitch published a bestselling book with the elongated title, “We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families: Stories From Rwanda,” which has been described as a journalism of moral witness.

Mr. Gourevitch wants to cut through certain misconceptions regarding the Paris Review. “I’m not planning to make it a journalism magazine,” he said. He plans to create poetry portfolios, meaning more poems for each poet, but fewer poets for each issue. Sometimes trying to get a sense of a poet from a single poem is “a little bit like a bonbon,” he explained.

Asked what kinds of work he is interested in receiving, Mr. Gourevitch said he wants to be surprised. “I want a magazine that feels essential,” he said. He doesn’t want it to be thought of as recherche. “Sometimes I hear people say it’s a writer’s magazine. I want to be clear it’s also always a reader’s magazine. I want it to be on every serious reader’s bedside table, unless it’s already been stolen by their teenage daughter,” he said. The circulation is under 10,000. “You could also say ‘less than 1,000,000’ without lying,” he observed shrewdly. Plimpton, as patrician turned populist, once joked about increasing readers by leaving subscription cards on empty bus seats.

Since Plimpton’s death, the Paris Review has been planning to relocate its office; Mr. Gourevitch is considering both Manhattan and Brooklyn. “Of course, we would be entirely willing,” he said, breaking into a smile, “to accept the hospitality of someone who recognizes the incomparable pleasure that having the Paris Review as permanent houseguest can bring.”

The new Paris Review editor’s own household is more than full. He is married to New Yorker staff writer Larissa MacFarquhar, whom he met after her brother gave her the Rwanda book and said, “You should meet this guy.” They have a 4-month-old daughter, Clio. So it’s a time of beginnings.