LuAnn Walther to Retire from Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group

LuAnn Walther, senior v-p and editorial director of Vintage, Anchor, and Everyman's Library, will retire effective July 1. 

Walther has worked in publishing for more than 40 years. She began her career at Bantam Books, where she founded Bantam Classics and first published Sam Shepard, becoming his lifelong editor. She then joined NAL where she was executive editor for Plume, Meridian, and Signet Classics. And over the last three decades, she has been part of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, where she spent 32 years working for Sonny Mehta, and collaborated with such authors as Margaret Atwood and Ian McEwan. 

Walther also helped create the Vintage Shorts e-book series and worked on new editions of Russian literary classics, which led to Tolstoy’s War and Peace entering the New York Times bestseller list for the first time in history.

In 2015, she was honored by the Poetry Society of America in celebration of Pocket Poets series in Everyman’s Library. In 2017 LuAnn was awarded the President’s Distinguished Alumni Medal from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.

“I have been so very fortunate to work with brilliant authors, publishers, and colleagues from the very beginning right up to the present,” Walther said. “And it is with immense gratitude that I look back on these years that were so full of the excitement and joy of reading and creating beautiful books.”