New York — Anne Goodoff, a pioneering book publisher for more than 30 years, looks to timeless works from Alexander Hamilton and Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil to current bestsellers. Giselle Bellicot And Governor of California. Gavin NewsomHe died. She was 76 years old.
Godoff died of cancer on Tuesday in Albany, New York, according to a statement from Penguin Press, which she founded in 2003.
“Anne’s impact on American book culture over the past four decades is immeasurable,” Scott Moyers, publisher of Penguin Press, said in a statement. “An editor of a wide range of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, she has contributed to countless New York Times bestsellers, numerous winners of every major award, and works that have appeared on all kinds of best-book lists—of the year, the decade, and the century.”
A one-time NYU film student who studied under a then-faculty member martin scorsese, Selling cars and assisting on the Dr. Joyce Brothers television show, Godoff was a late bloomer who did not begin her publishing career until her early 30s and quickly revealed an extraordinary talent for spotting and developing talent. As a rising editor at Random House in the 1990s, she published such debut phenomena as John Berendt’s Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil and Caleb Carr “Strange.”
I also worked with Salman Rushdie,L.Doctor,W Arundhati Roy He had lasting relationships with Michael Pollan and Ron Chernowwhose books with Godoff included the Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of George Washington and the biography of Hamilton that was the basis of the award-winning musical.
“Anne supervised me with a light touch and never got lost in the details,” Chernow wrote in an email to The Associated Press.
He added, “She was no less talented in creating the book’s layout—everything from the cover art to the paper stock—with a look that was completely consistent with my image of the character.” “Everything was fragmented and passed directly to marketing and advertising. I always felt myself in more competent hands.”
Godoff was eventually promoted to president and editor-in-chief of Random House, her standing so high that when she was forced to resign in 2003 amid a corporate restructuring, her departure sparked discussions — evergreen in the industry — about the alarming decline of literary publishing.
But Penguin soon signed her on to lead its new Penguin Press imprint. Chernow, Pollan and other authors moved there with her, and she continued to publish bestsellers and critical favorites, including Pulitzer Prize winners like Steve Cole’s “Ghost Wars” and John Lewis Gaddis’s “George F. Kennan.”
When Random House and Penguin merged into Penguin Random House in 2013, Goodoff was under the same roof as her old company. Even at the time of her death, she was shaping the public conversation. Plicott’s “Hymn to Life” chronicles her horrific marriage and how she became a leading voice against sexual violence, while Newsom’s “A Young Man in a Hurry” is widely seen as a building block for a 2028 presidential run.
Godoff was born in 1949 in New York City, grew up in New York and California, and graduated from Bennington College. I started at Simone & Schuster in the early 1980s as an assistant to Alice Mayhew, the famous editor of Bob Woodward, Doris Kearns Goodwin and others. After serving as editor-in-chief of the Atlantic Monthly Press, Godoff joined Random House in 1991.
Her marriage to Malcolm Drummond ended in divorce in 2012. Her survivors include her partner, writer and photographer Annick Lafarge, and her brother, Peter Godoff.
Godoff was never the outsized figure of Random House predecessors like Bennett Cerf and Harold Evans. She was considered by many to be serious, hard-working and committed, and known for saying, “The book will stay.” But she was competitive, and didn’t mind spreading the news. It paid $8 million for the next novel by “Cold Mountain” author Charles Frazier, a sum many found exaggerated at the time, and a similar sum for a memoir by former Federal Reverse Chairman Alan Greenspan.
Best-selling author Roger Lowenstein, whose books have all been published by Godoff, wrote in an email to the AP that she was a strict but meticulous editor. He recalled a “stinging note” from her while drafting the manuscript for “Ways and Means: Lincoln, His Government, and the Financing of the Civil War,” an award-winning history published in 2022. His final draft was 90 pages shorter and he couldn’t think of “one word” he regretted deleting.
“I generally reserved her praise, at least in my case, until the end of the process, often in letters that arrived unexpectedly in the mail,” he wrote. “Nothing was ever sweeter, because you worked hard to get there, and because you knew it meant it.”