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| Jane Garrett | |
Jane Garrett, who as an editor at Knopf "guided seven books to Pulitzer Prizes for history but watched another book lose its prestigious Bancroft Prize over scholars' criticism of the author's research," died October 12, the New York Times reported. She was 88. Garrett worked at Knopf for 44 years, initially as an editor and special assistant to Alfred Knopf himself. She began by steering his projects to completion, but soon began acquiring books herself.
In 1973, People of Paradox: An Inquiry Concerning the History of American Civilization by Michael Kammen, became the first of the books she edited to win a Pulitzer. The next, in 1987, was Voyagers to the West: A Passage in the Peopling of America on the Eve of the Revolution by Bernard Bailyn, followed a year later by Robert V. Bruce's The Launching of Modern American Science, 1846-1876.
Garrett was at a book party in Boston when she met Alan Taylor, who was starting to work on a book about William Cooper, founder of Cooperstown, N.Y., and the father of James Fenimore Cooper. After their conversation, Taylor sent her a book proposal. "It was pretty academic, so she asked, 'Can you rework this and draw the characters out more?' and I got a contract," he recalled. "It was the first time I got paid upfront for anything." Taylor's William Cooper's Town: Power and Persuasion on the Frontier of the Early American Republic (1995) won the 1996 Pulitzer.
Several books edited by Garrett also received the Bancroft Prize for American history and diplomacy from Columbia University, including two titles in 1996 (Taylor's book and David Reynolds's Walt Whitman's America: A Cultural Biography) and Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture by Michael Bellesiles in 2001.
Bellesiles's thesis--that very few people owned working guns in colonial America--set off a furious academic debate, the Times noted, adding that scholars documented serious errors in the author's research. At first, Garrett backed Bellesiles, but later that year Columbia rescinded his Bancroft and Knopf cut its ties with the author in 2003. "I still do not believe in any shape or form he fabricated anything," Garrett told the AP at the time. "He's just a sloppy researcher."
Although she joined Knopf in 1967, Garrett was not well known in publishing circles, in part because she stopped working in the company's Manhattan office in the mid-1970s to work from home, first in Cornwall, Vt., and later in Leeds, Mass.
"When I came in here, it was some months before I realized there was this editor who operated in the hinterlands someplace," Sonny Mehta, then the president of Knopf, told the Times for a profile of Garrett in 1996. "Jane was the last person I got to know here."
Garrett's other Pulitzer winners were A Midwife's Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812 by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich (1990); The Radicalism of the American Revolution by Gordon S. Wood (1991), and Jack Rakove's Original Meanings: Politics and Ideas in the Making of the Constitution (1997). She also edited bestsellers, including Karen Armstrong's A History of God: The 4000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam by (1993) and The Road From Coorain by Jill Ker Conway (1989).