Gourt Home::Gourt :: Jason Epstein
Jason Epstein (born 1930) is an American editor and publisher.
A 1949 graduate of Columbia College (now known as Columbia University), Epstein was hired by Bennett Cerf at Random House, where he was the editorial director for forty years. He was responsible for the Vintage paperbacks, which published such authors as Norman Mailer, Vladimir Nabokov, E. L. Doctorow, Gore Vidal, and Philip Roth. In 1952, while an editor at Doubleday, he created the Anchor Books imprint. This was the first of the trade paperback formats, a format which has consistently remained profitable and popular since that time.
In 1963, during the New York City newspaper strike, he co-founded the New York Review of Books, with his then-wife, Barbara Epstein.
He wrote a book entitled Book Business: Publishing Past, Present, and Future. In 1979, he launched the nonprofit Library of America to market archival quality editions of American classic literature. The first volumes were published in 1982, and the company now prints about 250,000 volumes per year.
He is still under contract with Random House to work with some his former clients, notably Doctorow and Mailer. He has been the recipient of the first National Book Award for Distinguished Service to American Letters and the Curtis Benjamin Award of the Association of American Publishers for "inventing new kinds of publishing and editing."
In 1993, Epstein married Judith Miller, a journalist who wrote for The New York Times and was incarcerated for refusing to reveal her sources in the Karl Rove-Robert Novak CIA leak story. He created a residence in a former firehouse in Greenwich Village, which was decorated by Robert Denning of Denning & Fourcade.
Books
- Book Business: Publishing: Past, Present, and Future, W. W. Norton & Company 2001 ISBN 0393049841, 2002 reprint: ISBN 0393322343
External links
1930 births | Living people | American non-fiction writers | Jewish-American journalists | Publishers (people)
"Jason Epstein"