Sol Stein, a "prolific novelist and playwright, savvy publisher and visionary editor who helped fashion a collection of trenchant essays by James Baldwin, a former high school classmate, into a literary classic, Notes of a Native Son," died September 19, the New York Times reported. He was 92.
In 1962, Stein and his wife at the time, Patricia Day, founded the publishing house Stein and Day and had immediate success with director Elia Kazan's debut novel, America America, which sold three million copies. Kazan subsequently adapted it into a movie, released the next year.
Stein worked with many notable authors, including Jacques Barzun, Lionel Trilling, David Frost, Budd Schulberg and Dylan Thomas. Stein and Day also published defense lawyer F. Lee Bailey, writer Claude Brown, critic Leslie Fiedler, socialite and memoirist Barbara Howar, and Soviet Union scholar Bertram Wolfe, among many others. Stein's book Bankruptcy: A Feast for Lawyers (1989), exposed the "bureaucratic nightmare" that had accompanied the financial implosion of Stein and Day after 27 years in business.
He was also among the 10 founding members in 1957 of the Playwrights Group of the Actors Studio, which included Robert Anderson, Lorraine Hansberry, William Inge and Tennessee Williams.
Stein's lifelong association with Baldwin began when they were both editors of The Magpie, the literary magazine at DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx, N.Y. The Times reported that "their friendship resumed after World War II, reaching its literary apex in 1955 with the publication of Mr. Baldwin's Notes, his anthology of essays on the black experience." Stein edited the book and later chronicled their relationship in Native Sons: A Friendship That Created One of the Greatest Works of the Twentieth Century: Notes of a Native Son (2004).
Stein was the author of more than a dozen books, "including how-to guides for novelists, and he sold software that was marketed as 'guaranteed to eliminate writer's block,' " the Times noted. In Stein on Writing (1995), he advised: "Be sure you don't stop the story while describing. You are a storyteller, not an interior decorator.... Good writing is supposed to evoke sensation in the reader. Not the fact that it's raining, but the feeling of being rained upon."
While publishing the works of other authors, Stein "had a thriving writing career of his own," the Washington Post reported. "He completed his first novel, The Husband (1969), in 17 days by rewriting one of his plays. His 1971 novel, The Magician, inspired by his childhood interest in magic, was a page-turning legal thriller that sold more than a million copies."
All of his nine novels were published by companies other than Stein and Day. "I have 100 other authors every year," he said in 1985, "and if I publish myself I am in competition with them."
In 1990, he observed: "I've had 36 years of editing, and at the same time I've had nine novels published. So in a sense what I've got is not the attitude of a teacher, or of a failed writer, but that of the craftsman who wants to pass along that craft to others."