Erroll McDonald, v-p and executive editor at Alfred A. Knopf, pays tribute to the legendary Random House editor and industry entrepreneur, who died February 4 at age 93.
Jason Epstein was larger than the sum of his brilliant accomplishments, as inventor of the quality trade paperback, imagineer of the New York Review of Books, editor of uncanny discernment (at Doubleday, Anchor, Random House, and Vintage), facilitator of the Library of America, visionary of the digital book world. He had an aura of the Blessing about him; the authenticity of his charisma was palpable. He was an avatar of sparkling contradictions—a testament to the titanic complexity of the man.
He was, of course, one of the most consequential literary and publishing figures in the history of American publishing, his ambition being to make culture accessible to as many as possible. He beamed and cackled whenever I channeled Rodney Dangerfield in Back to School: “Hey folks, It’s on me. Shakespeare for everyone, okay?” Yet he thought of himself as being in the book business only “incidentally.” He preferred to cast himself chiefly as a capitalist entrepreneur, always with an eye on a piece of the action for himself. In his 20s he flew to London to try to persuade Allen Lane to sell him Penguin Books, so convinced was he of the profitability of publishing as he, Jason, had conceived it.
His fierce independence, rigorous discipline, and astonishing celerity of intellect were always on display (he could be piercingly pithy on Blake, Flaubert, Adam Smith, or Popeye the Sailor Man), but he took greatest delight in rambling about quotidian curiosities: How did the phrase “to drum up business” come to be? What did it have to do with the Civil War? Why were little pepper mills in restaurants replaced by humongous ones? Why were the latter called Rubirosas?
His politics were left leaning, progressive, or so it seemed: he wrote a book in support of the Chicago Seven called (with resonance for our times) The Great Conspiracy Trial: An Essay on Law, Liberty and the Constitution. In the ’60s he hired Random House’s first Black senior editor, Charles Harris, and encouraged him to publish Amistad, a journal of Black politics and culture, in Vintage (Charles went on to distinguish himself as director of Howard University Press and founder of Amistad Press, nowadays a HarperCollins imprint). Yet Jason was clear-eyed and unapologetic about white privilege. When I faced a family predicament as a junior editor, he remarked: “When our grandmothers die, we get money.”
For nearly 20 years, Jason was a mentor to me, imparting invaluable advice, strategizing to advance my career, persuading me to stay the course in an industry about which I had serious doubts (he once declared that I was most assuredly the kind of person who started having midlife crises when I was four years old). He graced me with kindnesses too many to number. Each surprised me, for his capacity for emotional brutality was legend. My gratitude for his tutelage, wisdom, and generosity will always be boundless. I am honored to have been moved, however faintly, by his at once awe-inspiring and terrifying sublimity. Jason Epstein is a lodestar, his influence ever more about to be.
