Crusading publisher and author
NEW YORK — Sir Harold Evans, the charismatic publisher, author and muckraker who brought investigative moxie to the British press, newsmaking dash to the American book business through bestsellers like “Primary Colors” and synergetic buzz to all as author-publisher Tina Brown’s husband, has died. He was 92.
Brown said he died Wednesday in New York of congestive heart failure.
A vision of British erudition and sass, Mr. Evans was a high-profile go-getter, starting in the 1960s as an editor of the Northern Echo and the Sunday Times of London and continuing into the 1990s as president of Random House. His marriage to Brown was a paradigm of media clout and A-list access that helped shape the book and magazine markets for years and helped embody the term “synergy” for businesses reinforcing each other.
A defender of literature and print journalism well into the digital age, Mr. Evans was one of the all-time newspaper editors, startling British society with revelations of espionage, corporate wrongdoing and government scandal. In the U.S., he published such attention-getters as the mysterious political novel “Primary Colors.”
“Harold Evans was a true genius. I know of no one else who had the range he had with words — as crusading editor, thoughtful writer, book publisher, book author and most importantly in energetic conversation,” Bob Woodward wrote in an email Thursday to the AP.
“A newspaper is an argument on the way to a deadline,” Evans once wrote. He had yet to turn 40 when he became editor of the Sunday Times, where he reigned and rebelled for 14 years until he was pushed out by Rupert Murdoch. Notable stories included taking on the manufacturers of the drug Thalidomide, which caused birth defects in children, and revealing that Britain’s Kim Philby was a Soviet spy.