Walter Minton, 96, was U.S. publisher of ‘Lolita’

NEW YORK » Walter J. Minton, a publishing scion and risk taker with a self- described “nasty streak” who as head of G.P. Putnam’s Sons released works by Norman Mailer and Terry Southern among others and signed up Vladimir Nabokov’s scandalous “Lolita,” has died at age 96.

Minton’s wife, Marion, tells The Associated Press that he died Tuesday at their home in Ponte Vedra Beach, Florida. She cited no specific cause of death.

The son of longtime Putnam president Melville Minton, Walter Minton was in his early 30s when he inherited the position in 1955 after his father’s death and remained until he was forced out in 1978 by corporate parent MCA. (Putnam is now part of Penguin Random House). Minton presided over an era of profit and growth, including the acquisition of the Berkley Publishing Corporation, although his abrupt style didn’t gain him affection.

Mailer paid an off-hand compliment when he called Minton “the only publisher I ever met who would make a good general.” In the mid1950s, Mailer’s novel “Barbary Shore” had flopped and raised questions about whether the author of “The Naked and the Dead” would have a lasting career. After Rinehart & Company dropped Mailer’s Hollywood saga “The Deer Park” because of concerns about obscenity, Minton offered Mailer a $10,000 advance, a record for Putnam at the time. “The Deer Park” became a bestseller, and Mailer would release several other works through Putnam, including his landmark “Advertisements for Myself,” the essay collection “The Presidential Papers” and the novel “Why are We in Vietnam?”

Other Putnam successes under Minton’s leadership included Merle Miller’s oral biography of Harry Truman, “Plain Speaking,” and a pair of risque novels:

“Candy,” by Southern and Mason Hoffenberg; and a reissue of the 18th century erotic shocker “Fanny Hill,” the object of court battles in Massachusetts and New York in the mid-1960s.

One of Minton’s most lucrative decisions came soon after he started as Putnam’s president.

“Lolita,” Nabokov’s classic about a literature professor’s obsession with a 12-year- old girl, inspired shock and admiration when released in Europe in 1955. But it remained without a publisher in the U. S. Several companies turned the novel down, and an editor at Viking worried that anyone releasing “Lolita” could be jailed.

Minton’s interest was accidental. Married at the time to Pauline Ehst, he became involved with a Copacabana dancer named Rosemary Ridgewell. As noted in Sarah Weinman’s “The Real Lolita,” published in 2018, Minton offered differing accounts on when and where he first heard of the novel, but made it clear that Ridgewell encouraged him to read it.

“Dear Mr. Nabokov,” Minton wrote to the author in 1957, “being a rather backward example of that rather backward species, the American publisher, it was only recently I began to hear about a book called ‘Lolita.’ I am wondering if the book is available for publication.”

Nabokov’s European publisher, Maurice Giradios, was convinced that Minton never got around to reading “Lolita.” But, in 1958, Putnam released the novel, which sold millions of copies despite being panned as “repulsive” by The New York Times and shunned by other newspaper reviewers.

“There was no prosecution, except by the critics,” Stacy Schiff, author of a Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Nabokov’s wife, Vera, later wrote.

Minton was married two times — once to Ehst, and most recently to Marion Whitehorn in 1970.