Richard E. Snyder--called "a visionary and imperious executive" by the AP--who built Simon & Schuster into the largest U.S. publisher in the 1980s and early '90s, died on Tuesday, June 6. He was 90.
Snyder began his career at S&S in the early '60s as a sales assistant and rose through the ranks to become president in 1975 and CEO in 1978. He held both positions until 1994, when he was fired by Viacom shortly after it bought the company. During Snyder's tenure, S&S's sales jumped from around $40 million annually to more than $2 billion. After S&S, he tried to revive Golden Books, but that effort failed.
Snyder focused on sales and blockbusters, with a particular emphasis on books by politicians and about politics, including most famously Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein's All the President's Men and The Final Days. (S&S has been Woodward's longtime publisher.) Others included David McCullough, Doris Kearns Goodwin, and Ronald Reagan, as well as Watergate era figures John Dean, John Ehrlichman, John Mitchell, and Richard Nixon himself.
Of course, S&S also published many fiction writers of note during Snyder's time, including Mary Higgins Clark, Larry McMurtry, Philip Roth, Graham Greene, and Joan Didion.
Snyder expressed his sales-driven style well in 1984, when he told the New York Times, "You cannot be a publisher any longer without also being a businessman. The thought that you can publish just because you love books is a sure prescription for failure."
Snyder was widely known as gruff, mean, vindictive, and worse, and yet quite a few people who worked for him were loyal and appreciative.