After a career of more than 40 years, LuAnn Walther, senior v-p and editorial director of Vintage Books, Anchor Books and Everyman's Library, is retiring, effective July 1.
She began 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. During the past three decades, she has played what the company called "an essential role in what is now the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group," including 32 years working for the late Sonny Mehta.
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| LuAnn Walther (l.) with Ian McEwan and Margaret Atwood | |
In an announcement, Suzanne Herz, executive v-p, publisher, Vintage/Anchor Books, said that at KDPG, Walther "has exhibited her singular editorial vision and wide-ranging reading prowess time and again. Whether in the paperback imprints of Vintage and Anchor or in hardcover editions at Knopf, Pantheon, and Everyman's, she has worked closely with a myriad list of legendary authors who have collectively won the Nobel Prize, multiple Pulitzer Prizes, National Book Awards, and PEN Literary Awards. That incredible list includes Margaret Atwood, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Maxine Hong Kingston, Irving Howe, Kazuo Ishiguro, Gish Jen, Ha Jin, Alfred Kazin, Hermione Lee, Ian McEwan, Toni Morrison, Alice Munro, Philip Roth, Oliver Sacks, Ali Smith, Anna Deavere Smith, and Cheryl Strayed, among many others....
"Her efforts in creating the Vintage Shorts e-book series, which has now sold half a million copies, brought new readers to a wide array of Vintage/Anchor backlist authors. And her work with the acclaimed Russian translators Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky on new editions of Russian literary classics led to Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace hitting the New York Times bestseller list for the first time in history."
In 2015, Walther was honored by the Poetry Society of America for the Pocket Poets series in Everyman's Library. In 2017, she was awarded the President's Distinguished Alumni Medal from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, which cited her "extraordinary work in elevating the written word and extending its reach to generations of diverse readers."
Walther commented: "I have been so very fortunate to work with brilliant authors, publishers, and colleagues from the very beginning right up to the present. 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."
Margaret Atwood said, "I am happy to celebrate LuAnn's departure--what am I saying? I am not happy to celebrate her departure. I wish she would stay on for ever and ever. But I am happy to celebrate Her. LuAnn has been my hyperintelligent reader, dedicated editor, radiant smiler, and personal friend for a very long time. Her tact, courage, and publishing smarts are well known; perhaps less well known is her ability to improvise, to stickhandle bizarre situations, and to snatch victory from the jaws of disaster. This is how I like to picture LuAnn: a will of iron concealed beneath her cheerful exterior. A combo of Little House on the Prairie, Annie Get Your Gun, a dash of The Gambler, and, say, Elizabeth Bennett from Pride and Prejudice. Go get 'em, LuAnn! Whoever 'em may be."
And Ian McEwan said, "It is not at all difficult to single out the elements that have enabled LuAnn's distinguished career: fine editorial judgment and integrity coupled with an immense resource of personal warmth. With her spooky gift of perennial youth, she shocks us with this news of her retirement. But she has many future projects to fulfill and I wish her further brilliant successes in the years ahead."