In high school, Will Murphy would sometimes sneak books under his desk and read during class. He was partial to philosophy; Emerson was a particular favorite. Fast forward about 12 years: Murphy was an editor at Random House's Modern Library. He worked on republishing classics like Moby-Dick, commissioning new translations and repackaging some older Modern Library books, including, of all things, The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Murphy chuckles over the full-circle nature of his career and then turns serious, noting that both his reading and professional lives revolve around being “drawn to books that change the way I think, or change the way I feel, or change the way I think and feel.”
In his current post as executive editor at Random House, Murphy has become known for editing books that fit that criteria, books Random's v-p, executive director of publicity and public relations, Carol Schneider calls “big think books.” Among the works the 39-year-old Murphy has edited are American Vertigo: Traveling America In the Footsteps of Tocqueville by Bernard-Henri Lévy, Fear: Anti-Semitism After Auschwitz: An Essay in History Interpretation by Jan Gross, The Rising Tide: A Novel of the Second World War by Jeff Shaara, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable by Nassim Nicholas Taleb and The Lucifer Effect:Understanding How Good People Turn Evil by Philip Zimbardo. Later this year he will publish the highly anticipated new work by Salman Rushdie, The Enchantress of Florence; as well as The Second World: Enemies and Influence in the New Global Order by Parag Khanna. And on his not-yet-scheduled list are How Success Happens by David Brooks and The Battle of the Crater by Richard Slotkin.
Murphy says he gets “really excited” about the books he edits. “I become passionately engaged with them. I invariably find that I just want to talk about [them]. I call my mom, I call my friends, I might call you. My hope in publishing such books is that other people will have a similar reaction. That's word of mouth, and that's a particularly important driver for many kinds of books.”
Looking at Murphy's ideas-driven list, it's not surprising that the editor initially had hopes of becoming an academic. After studying literature at Bard College, he moved to California and explored various graduate school options. He ultimately decided the academic life was not for him and took a job at the University of California Press. He was eventually promoted to literary editor, and then, in 1997, he moved to Minneapolis to run the humanities list at the University of Minnesota Press, where he worked on books on history, American studies, literature and literary criticism. He made the move to New York in 1999 and became a senior editor at the Modern Library.
“From day one it was an incredible experience,” Murphy says of his arrival at Random. “I feel like my real training in trade book publishing began at that moment.” He learned how to edit from some of the industry's masters: Jason Epstein, Bob Loomis and Kate Medina. Murphy is especially grateful to Loomis. “Just being around him, I learn something every day. I've learned a lot about how to read from Bob Loomis. He has an incredibly focused and serious eye.” Murphy works with powerhouse authors, too. He says Rushdie's new novel “changed my head” and calls working with the author “absolutely incredible.” He considers French intellectual Lévy “a hero of mine, a great thinker, a great moralist, a great humanitarian and a great friend.”
Murphy loves working at Random and has no plans to move on (unless he gets a call from NASA). The world of book publishing may be changing, but Murphy's staying put: “The serious book as we know it will only go away, will only be replaced by something else, when a moon-sized asteroid obliterates all life on Earth.”
