Best-selling author also known as publisher
Sol Stein, a best-selling novelist who later developed software programs for writers but was perhaps best known as the publisher of major works by James Baldwin and Che Guevara, died Sept. 19 at his home in Tarrytown, New York. He was 92.
He died of complications from dementia, said his wife, Edith Shapiro.
Stein had a varied career, beginning in the 1950s with the Voice of America, where he helped formulate anti-communist programming that was broadcast to dozens of countries around the world.
He also wrote plays and moved into publishing, first at Beacon Press, where in 1955 he edited Baldwin’s Notes of a Native Son, a collection of essays about the African-american experience that became a literary classic.
Stein had known Baldwin since they were students at Dewitt Clinton High School in the Bronx and staff members on the school literary journal.
“So much happened in our work together that his colour disappeared, my colour disappeared and it stayed that way for the rest of our lives,” Stein told The New York Times in 2004.
After many years at Beacon, Stein formed an independent publishing company, Stein & Day, in 1962. His business partner and the corporate vice president was his wife at the time, Patricia Day. Over the next 25 years, Stein & Day published hundreds of books, including works by such figures as David Frost, Jack Higgins, Budd Schulberg, Marilyn Monroe and F. Lee Bailey.
In 1968, Stein won a complex international scramble to publish the diaries of the charismatic Argentine-born revolutionary Ernesto (Che) Guevara.
While publishing the works of others, Stein had a thriving writing career of his own. His nine novels all were published by companies other than Stein & Day.
Solomon Stein was born Oct. 13, 1926, in Chicago and moved as a child to New York. His father was a jewelry designer, his mother an interpreter who eventually worked for the United Nations.
Stein entered college at 15, served in the Army during the Second World War, then graduated in 1948 from the City College of New York. He received a master’s degree in English literature from Columbia University in 1949.
His marriages to Sondra Klein and Patricia Day ended in divorce. Survivors include his wife since 2000, Dr. Edith Shapiro; seven children; two stepchildren; nine grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.