Clay Schuette Felker (October 2, 1925 – July 1, 2008) was an American magazine editor and journalist who co-founded New York magazine in 1968 and California magazine (first known as New West) in 1976. He was known for bringing numerous journalists into the profession. The New York Times wrote in 1995, "Few journalists have left a more enduring imprint on late 20th-century journalism—an imprint that was unabashedly mimicked even as it was being mocked—than Clay Felker."

He was born in 1925 in Webster Groves, Missouri, son of Carl Felker, an editor of The Sporting News, and his wife, the former Cora Tyree, the former women's editor of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Both of Clay's parents, along with a grandfather and a grandmother, graduated from the University of Missouri School of Journalism. He had one sibling, Charlotte. Felker's grandfather, Henry Clay Felker, of German aristocratic origins, fled Germany after the 1848 Conservative takeover. The family surname was originally von Fredrikstein.

Felker attended Duke University, where he first became interested in journalism and edited the student newspaper, The Duke Chronicle. He left school in 1943 to join the Navy, but returned to the school to graduate in 1951.

In 1983, he founded the editorial board for the alumni publication Duke Magazine. Duke awarded Felker an honorary degree in 1998, as well as the Futrell Award for Excellence in Communications and Journalism. Duke Magazine created the staff position of Clay Felker Fellow for "an aspiring journalist with unusual promise."

After graduation, Felker worked as a sportswriter for Life magazine. He developed an article he wrote about Casey Stengel as a full-length book, Casey Stengel's Secret (1961). He was on the development team for Sports Illustrated and was features editor for Esquire. He later worked for Time.

Felker gave Gloria Steinem what she later called her first "serious assignment", regarding contraception; he didn't like her first draft and had her re-write the article. Her resulting 1962 article, about the way in which women are forced to choose between a career and marriage, preceded Betty Friedan's book The Feminine Mystique by one year. Steinem joined the founding staff of Felker's New York magazine and became politically active in the feminist movement. Felker funded the first issue of Ms. magazine, founded by Steinem and other feminist leaders.

After losing a battle for Esquire editorship to Harold Hayes, Felker left to join The New York Herald Tribune in 1962. He revamped a Sunday section into New York and hired writers such as Tom Wolfe and Jimmy Breslin. The section became the "hottest Sunday read in town."

A long-time friend of Wolfe, Felker was one of the early proponents of New Journalism and key to its emergence. The New York Herald Tribune closed its doors in 1966. Felker later, in 1968, reconstituted the Sunday section as New York magazine. After founding New York in 1968, one of his first features was Wolfe's coverage of Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters. Wolfe expanded this account into his non-fiction novel The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.