On February 4, local time, the famous American editor and publisher Jason Epstein died at his home in New York's Sag Harbor at the age of 93.
According to his wife, writer and former New York Times reporter Judith Miller, Epstein died of congestive heart failure. When he died, Epstein was surrounded by books.
Jason Epstein at his home in New York in 2001. Source: The Associated Press
Epstein was one of the co-founders of The New York Review of Books. As an innovator in the publishing world, his greatest achievement was to launch the "paperback book revolution", which put classic books into paperbacks. He also helped found the Library of America series of books, which reissued the great works of great writers, beautifully bound and enduring. He has collaborated with many famous novelists, including E.L. Doctoro. Doctorow), Vladimir Nabokov and Philip Roth.
He received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Book Foundation in 1988 and was included in the National Book Critics Circle in 2002.
Jason Epstein has been described as a combination of the erudition of a literary scholar and the entrepreneurial spirit of a trolley peddler. At the age of 23, he had an idea to revolutionize the way books are sold.
His first publishing job was at Doubleday, where he made $45 a week. Unable to afford many books, he suggested publishing cheap paperback editions of classic literature and critical books on two days. Until then, paperbacks were almost all low-level escapist novels.
In 1952, Epstein introduced anchor books, an early work by the British writer D.H. Lawrence. Lawrence), the critics Lionel Trilling and Edmund Wilson, and the 19th-century French novelist Stendhal. The books, priced at 65 cents to $1.25, were published in 10,000 copies and sold out in 4 weeks.
Students were particularly interested in the so-called "paperback revolution," and other publishers followed In Epstein's footsteps in publishing literary classics to challenge the massively published paperbacks. High-quality paperbacks, or "trade" paperbacks, became the most lucrative part of the publishing industry.
Epstein had brought the famous novelist Vladimir Nabokov to Two Days, but when the company refused to publish Nabokov's controversial novel Lolita, he left the company.
Before joining Random House in 1958, Epstein worked at Alfred W. Bush. Alfred A. Knopf briefly ran the paperback brand Vintage. The decades-old company is still run by its founders Bennett Cerf and Donald Klopfer.
"My office," Epstein wrote in his 2001 memoir, Book Business, "used to be a bedroom where I went to work from time to time and sometimes found a wayward writer spending the night there, and I wasn't always alone." ”
At Random House, Epstein edited novelists Philip Roth, Gore Vidal, Norman Mailer, and E.L. Doctor. Doctorow' works, as well as the work of the poet W. Bush. W.H. Auden's work.
He was as knowledgeable and opinionated as the writers he worked with. "He's very smart," Norman Mailer once joked, once telling The Associated Press that he had to adapt to an editor who was "probably much smarter than he was." Epstein had a heated argument with Gore Vidal and became a critic of american libraries, arguing that the library he had helped build had become bloated. Bennett Cerf, co-founder of Random House, called him "cross I bear," while Epstein called surf "bear I cross."
Among the many books edited by Epstein are Doctoreau's Novel billy Bathgate about the Great Depression, Jane Jacobs' classic book on urban studies, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, and Mailer's epic magnum opus about the CIA, The Ghost of Harlot. （Harlot’s Ghost）。
Epstein said he never missed a bestseller, though he proudly rejected Shirley MacLaine's popular "Out ona Limb."
"We are friends, and much of the book was written by her at my home in Sag Harbor on Long Island, New York. But she never told me what was going on. I read the book and said, 'Come on, Shirley, you're crazy. ’”
Epstein was director of the editorial department at Random House from 1976 to 1995, but until the 21st century, he maintained a partnership with the company that now belongs to Penguin Random House.
As a publisher, Epstein was acutely aware of the value of newspaper book reviews. In late 1962, a union strike in New York led to the suspension of seven newspapers in the city. Epstein, along with his first wife, Barbara, the poet Robert Lowell, and his then-wife, the writer Elizabeth Hardwick, came up with the idea of starting the independent publication The New York Review of Books. Barbara Epstein and Robert Silvers became co-editors.
The first issue of the New York Review of Books, published on February 1, 1963, featured articles by literary masters such as Hardwick, Mary McCarthy, Susan Sontag, and William Styron, as well as poems by Lowell, Auden, John Ashbery, and Adrienne Rich.
The New York Review of Books was an immediate success and continued to flourish after the strike that killed many New York newspapers, but the New York Review of Books continued to publish long commentaries and reports, sometimes lyrical, sometimes scathing, always big. Today, it remains one of the most important literary and political magazines in the United States.
Epstein influenced the editorial direction of the New York Review of Books behind the scenes, making it one of the first publications to oppose the Vietnam War in the 1960s. He occasionally wrote for it and covered the trial of the Chicago Seven. The Chicago Group of Seven, a group of activists, was accused of inciting riots during the 1968 Democratic National Convention. His report was later published in his 1970 book, The Great Conspiracy Trial.
An amiable and acclaimed gourmand, Epstein forged friendships with generations of writers, including Wilson, who has been a prominent literary critic since the 1920s. In his memoirs, Epstein describes his lunch with Wilson at the Princeton Club in New York. Wilson ordered "half a dozen" martinis as soon as he arrived.
"He didn't say six, he said half a dozen, as if they were oysters," Epstein told C-SPAN in 2001, "and I'll never forget that." I thought at least one was for me, but I was wrong. He said, 'Are you going to have to do half a dozen too?' ”
During lunch, Wilson mentioned that the United States does not have france's Seven Stars Poetry Society, a collection of the nation's greatest literary works. Since then, Epstein has been the driving force behind the American Library Series, which published the first books in 1979.
The project has now launched more than 300 volumes dedicated to the publication of classic American literature, from James Baldwin to F. Scott Fitzgerald. Scott Fitzgerald, to Eudora Welty, have a uniform version with a distinctive black cover.
"It was these big questions that ignited Jason's passion," Robert Gottlieb, a former head of publishing, told The Boston Globe in 2001, "and his response to these questions has been extraordinaryly influential." Think about how many great ideas he's already realized. There is no doubt that he has been the leading knowledge entrepreneur in the publishing industry of our time. ”
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Jason Epstein was born on August 25, 1928 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. His father was a successful textile salesman and his mother was a housewife.
From an early age, Epstein became a loyal reader, and he could hardly live without books throughout his life. In the late 1940s, he entered Columbia University, where its president was Dwight M. Dwight D. Eisenhower. Epstein met once with the future President of the United States and accidentally left a good impression on him. Epstein received a Bachelor of Arts degree in English in 1949 and a Master's degree in 1950.
Epstein once told C-SPAN: "I have always thought that my publishing career is a continuation of my wonderful undergraduate time at Columbia University, and I never thought of giving up my undergraduate time." It all happened purely by chance, and I inadvertently got into the book industry. There, I could continue to be a college student to spend the rest of my life. These authors are my teachers, and their books are my curriculum. ”
In addition to his 2001 memoir, Epstein wrote another book, Eating (2009), about his lifelong love of cooking and dining. He is known for hosting lavish dinners in his manhattan apartments and at his home in Sag Harbor.
His first wife, Barbara Zimmerman, ended in divorce. He also had relatives who lived, his wife Judith Miller, who married in 1993, and his two children from his first marriage, Helen and Jacob, and three grandchildren.
In 1989, Epstein led the publication of The Reader's Catalog, a 40,000-book title with descriptions, illustrations, and essays. Thousands of books can be made available through a single toll-free number, which he sees as a way to weaken the monopoly of bookstore chains and corporate publishers.
The Reader's Directory never became popular, but it was seen as a pioneer for Amazon. At first, Epstein thought Amazon, created by Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos, wouldn't succeed, but he welcomed any way books were delivered to readers. He is one of the few veterans in the publishing world who has shown an early and uncontrolled passion for technology.
"If we didn't have books, people wouldn't think at all," Epstein told C-SPAN, "I think without them we would be disoriented... They are the foundation of our democracy. That's why dictators like to throw books into the fire. Without them, we would not have democracy. ”
Recent issues of the New York Review of Books