Elisabeth Sifton, who the New York Times called "a widely respected book editor and publisher who burnished manuscripts by many of the 20th century's literary lions," died December 13 at age 80. In a long career at such illustrious houses as Viking, Knopf and Farrar, Straus & Giroux, she edited, among others, Saul Bellow, Isaiah Berlin, Don DeLillo, Carlos Fuentes, Philip Gourevitch, Michael Ignatieff, Stanley Karnow, Robert MacNeil and Peter Matthiessen.
Sifton was also an author. In 2003, she published The Serenity Prayer: Faith and Politics in Times of Peace and War, which in part told the story of the famous "serenity prayer," best known because of its adoption by Alcoholics Anonymous, that was written in 1943 by her father, famous theologian Reinhold Niebuhr. She put the prayer in its intended context--as an appeal for grace, courage and wisdom in a time of war--and she told of Niebuhr's efforts to fight fascism and promote social justice, racial equality and religious freedom.
Her other book--co-written with her husband, Fritz Stern, the eminent historian of Germany--No Ordinary Men: Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Hans von Dohnanyi, Resisters Against Hitler in Church and State, was published in 2013. Theologian Bonhoeffer and his brother-in-law von Dohnanyi together worked against the Nazi state, both philosophically and politically, likely doing what Sifton's father would have done were he in Germany instead of the U.S. in the same period.
The Serenity Prayer is available from Norton ($16.95, 9780393326628), and No Ordinary Men is available from New York Review Books ($19.95, 9781590176818).