Corlies Smith R.I.P.

[monroe at mpm.edu]

The New York Times 
November 24, 2004 
Corlies Smith, Editor of All-Star Authors, Dies at 75 
By CHARLES McGRATH 
  
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." 

http://nytimes.com/2004/11/24/books/24smith.html