Among the many heartfelt notes we've received about the death of Carolyn Reidy, president and CEO of Simon & Schuster, this one from John Campbell is wonderfully representative and includes some information we hadn't seen before:
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Your "In Memoriam" to our beloved friend Carolyn Reidy is so beautiful, so shining with Carolyn's energy that I've read it several times to soothe the ache of losing her.
Carolyn was my longest, dearest friend in publishing. We've known each other since 1983 and became very close friends, way beyond our mutual roles in publishing. When I decided, three years ago, to write a big new book on Jim Morrison, she was one of my biggest supporters and spoke often with me about Morrison's poetry, his final days in Paris, and various thoughts that came to her that she thought I should explore.
We were both doing our graduate work in the Midwest--Carolyn at Indiana University, and I at Wisconsin-Madison. She was several years ahead of me, though I completed my Ph.D. a few years before she was able to, given her busy career in publishing as she was also writing her dissertation. I doubt many people in publishing know that her doctoral dissertation was: "The Reader as Character in the High Victorian Novel: Studies of the Reader-Writer Relationship in Vanity Fair, The Way We Live Now, Middlemarch, and The Egoist."
Thank you so much for writing the most beautiful of all the tributes to Carolyn. Our shared broken hearts will be the only way to find peace and acceptance of this shocking loss.