Publishing Legend Sonny Mehta Is Dead at 77

Under Mehta’s leadership, Knopf noted, six of its writers were awarded Nobel Prizes – Kazuo Ishiguro, Alice Munro, Orhan Pamuk, Imre Kertész, V.S. Naipaul, and Toni Morrison – and dozens of others won Pulitzer Prizes, National Book Awards, Booker Prizes, and other notable honors. [...]although Mehta had great marketing instincts, he was personally publicity shy, preferring any media attention go to his authors. Mehta understood, Hughes said in an interview, that with the rise of superstores in the 1990s, “your book had to stand out with allure” to be noticed among the hundreds of other books on display. Mehta received the Maxwell E. Perkins Award for lifetime achievement from the Center for Fiction in 2018, and in his acceptance speech he talked of his love for reading: “Reading has been a constant in my life.