Corlies Smith, Editor of All-Star Authors, Is Dead at 75

[Erik T. Burns]

foax: shed a tear. etb
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> Corlies Smith, Editor of All-Star Authors, Is Dead at 75
> NYTF000020041124e0bo0001g
> The Arts/Cultural Desk; SECTC
> By CHARLES McGRATH
> 977 Words
> 24 November 2004
> The New York Times
> Late Edition - Final
> 12
> English
> (c) 2004 New York Times Company
>
> Corlies Smith, a New York book editor who in a 50-year career published an
all-star list of writers, from Muriel Spark and Jimmy Breslin to William
Trevor and Calvin Trillin, died on Monday in Manhattan. He was 75.
>
> The cause was emphysema, said his wife, Sheila.
>
> Mr. Smith, who was known as Cork, was one of the last of a breed. When he
first went to work, in 1952, publishing was a still a profession for tweedy,
Ivy League types who, in their younger days at least, were required to down
multiple martinis at lunch and then put in an afternoon's work. Mr. Smith
fit the bill perfectly. He was tall and good-looking, known for his elegant
manners and tart one-liners. But there was nothing snobbish or old fashioned
about his taste. In the late 50's he was the first editor to spot the then
unknown Thomas Pynchon; later he was the first to realize that Mr. Breslin
was much more than a newspaper columnist.
>
> Mr. Smith was renowned for his line editing, and for his ability to win
the trust of writers as different as Mr. Pynchon, famously reclusive, and
Mr. Breslin, famously street-smart. He was also an enterprising publisher.
In 1981, for example, he rescued William Kennedy's Pulitzer Prize-winning
novel ''Ironweed,'' which had bounced around some 13 publishing houses with
little success. Knowing that Saul Bellow was an admirer of Mr. Kennedy, Mr.
Smith persuaded him to go public with an endorsement. He then signed up
''Ironweed'' for his own firm, Viking, and got Penguin, Viking's paperback
subsidiary, to reissue simultaneously two earlier Kennedy novels, ''Billy
Phelan's Greatest Game'' and ''Legs.'' ''I didn't think of this as a
trilogy'' Mr. Kennedy said yesterday. ''For me it was just one book after
another. But Cork made it into a trilogy, and he turned the whole thing into
an event.''
>
> Mr. Smith loved literary books, the more highbrow the better, but he was
also a shrewd judge of mass market titles, including best-selling ones by
Clive Cussler and Jeffrey Archer. To agents or writers who did not know him,
Mr. Smith would introduce himself by saying, ''I have a good nose for
vanguard fiction, I handle all the sports books, and I have a golden touch
with commercial crap.'' All were true.
>
> Corlies Morgan Smith was born on March 31, 1929, to a Philadelphia family
so proper that one of its matriarchs was known to say, ''It's not a sin to
be a Presbyterian -- it's just a social error.'' His mother's maiden name
was Mary Howard Stewart; his father, C. Ross Smith, taught English at the
University of Pennsylvania. Mr. Smith attended Episcopal Academy in
Philadelphia and then Yale, from which he graduated, somewhat
unenthusiastically, in 1951.
>
> A year later he went to work for J.B. Lippincott, a venerable Philadelphia
publishing firm, and became co-editor of New World Writing, a
Lippincott-sponsored periodical devoted to new and experimental fiction. It
was there, while trolling through the slush pile, that he discovered the
work of, among others, Tillie Olsen and Mr. Pynchon, and he went on to
publish Mr. Pynchon's first two books at Lippincott, ''V'' and ''The Crying
of Lot 49.'' (Later, he acquired, though he did not ultimately edit, Mr.
Pynchon's third book, ''Gravity's Rainbow.'').
>
> In 1962, following in the tracks of his good friend Alan Williams, another
famous editor of the old school, Mr. Smith moved to Viking, a New York
publishing house. ''Cork was the perfect editor,'' Thomas Guinzburg, then
the head and owner of Viking, recalled yesterday. ''Writers loved him and
agents respected him, because they knew there was no guile. He spoke the
truth not as he saw it, but as it was.'' While at Viking, Mr. Smith expanded
his list until it became a collection of many of the best writers working in
English, and one of his numerous discoveries, John Williams, won the 1973
National Book Award for ''Augustus,'' his novel about the Roman emperor.
>
> In 1983 Mr. Smith left Viking, and a year later he became editorial
director of Ticknor & Fields. After a dispute, he resigned from Ticknor in
1989 and moved to Harcourt Brace, where he became editor in chief and
remained until his retirement in 1994. Many of his writers, like Carolyn
Chute, loyally followed him from stop to stop, and he continued to search
for new ones. After retirement he continued to freelance and frequently
called old colleagues with tips about talented prospects.
>
> Mr. Smith was a lifelong fan of the Philadelphia Phillies, and supplied
the writer Roger Angell with an immortal line when, after the Phillies won
the 1980 World Series, he leaned over to another fan and said, ''Kiss me,
Hardy, I'm dying!'' He got Mr. Angell started with baseball books when he
published ''The Summer Game,'' in 1972, and he also encouraged Jimmy Breslin
to write his early history of the Mets, ''Can't Anybody Here Play This
Game?''
>
> ''His allegiances were very simple,'' Mr. Breslin said. ''He was loyal to
his family, to his friends and to the English language. He was always
reading some old thing from the past. I couldn't keep up.''
>
> Mr. Smith is survived by his wife; by four sons, Mark, of Lenox, Ma.;
Nicholas, of San Francisco; Peter, of Williamstown, Mass.; and Timothy, of
Philadelphia; a daughter, Baylies Olin, of Rochester; a brother, C. Ross, of
Cocoa, Fla.; and seven grandchildren.
>
> There will be no memorial service, Mr. Guinzberg said, because ''Cork said
he didn't want a bunch of smart-aleck writers and editors standing up and
talking about how great he was.''
>