The Husband

Sol Stein edited and published some of the outstanding writers of the 20th century, including James Baldwin, David Frost, Jack Higgins, Elia Kazan, Dylan Thomas, Lionel Trilling, W. H. Auden, Jacques Barzun, and three heads of state. He is a prize-winning playwright produced on Broadway, an anthologized poet, the author of nine novels, plus nonfiction books, screenplays, and TV dramas. His novel The Magician sold over one million copies. His book Stein on Writing is now in trade paperback, and on tape, CD, and MP3. A more advanced writing book, How to Grow a Novel, has been selected by the Book-of-the-Month Club. Stein’s work has been translated into French, German, Italian, Norwegian, Swedish, Finish, Danish, Dutch, Greek, Japanese, and Russian. Stein has lectured on creative writing at Columbia University, the University of Iowa, and the University of California at Irvine, which presented him with the Distinguished Instructor Award in 1993 for his courses on dialogue and advanced fiction writing. Columbia University has established an archive for more than 1600 books published by Stein and Day, and an archive of Stein’s own manuscripts and his editorial work on the manuscripts of successful authors. In 1999, a distinguished panel selected by the Modern Library chose two nonfiction books edited by Stein in the top half of “the 100 best nonfiction works of the century,” James Baldwin’s Notes of a Native Son and George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia. Native Sons (8/2/04) contains the correspondence that produced Notes of a Native Son, as well as newly-discovered photographs and their two collaborations, "Dark Runner" and the television play Equal in Paris. Stein's play "Napoleon" won the Dramatists Alliance Prize for "the best full-length play of 1953" and was performed both in New York and California. With Tennessee Williams, William Inge, and Robert Anderson, he was a founding member of the Playwrights Group at the Actors Studio.