John S.Zinsser Jr., who as editor of Reader’s Digest Condensed Books in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s made nearly 800 carefully crunched versions of popular books available to millions of readers, died at home in Connecticut, USA, at the age of 84.
Zinsser was associate editor, executive editor and later editor-in-chief of Reader’s Digest Condensed Books from 1951 to 1987.
The series, which began in 1950 and ran 47 years under that name, provided subscribers with three to six shortened best-sellers in anthologies that were, at first, published four times a year, and later every other month. It is now known as Reader’s Digest Select Editions.
Among the authors whose works were edited under Zinsser were William Faulkner, Herman Wouk, John Steinbeck, Daphne du Maurier, Thor Heyerdahl, John P.Maarquand, Frederick Forsyth, Ken Follett, James Herriot, Peter Benchley and John le Carre.
“He believed ardently in the Digest’s populist mission of making well-written books with strong stories and interesting characters available to people who might not otherwise be readers,” Stephen Zinsser said of his father.
Brevity was important to Zinsser. When he retired in 1987, he told Publishers Weekly: “I do wish that all the books were not so long and getting longer,” adding that “the days of a good story told in a reasonable number of pages – like Cry, the Beloved Country in 283; To Kill a Mockingbird in 296 – seem gone.”
Stephen Zensser, a theater and opera stage manager, recalls sitting beside his father during a Metropolitan Opera performance of Richard Strauss’ ‘Rosenkavalier,’ with its talky libretto by Hugo von Hofmannsthal. “I said, ‘You look worried,’ and he said: ‘It is good. But it needs cutting.” - New York Times News Service
Courtesy: The Hindu, Madurai, June 12, 2008.
Grateful thanks to Dennis Hevesi, The New York Times News Service and The Hindu.
