Thomas Henry Guinzburg was an American editor and publisher who served as the first managing editor of The Paris Review following its inception in 1953 and later succeeded his father as president of the Viking Press

Viking Press

Viking Press is an American publishing company owned by the Penguin Group, which has owned the company since 1975. It was founded in New York City on March 1, 1925, by Harold K. Guinzburg and George S. Oppenheim...

.

Guinzburg was born on March 30, 1926, in Manhattan. His father Harold K. Guinzburg, the publisher and co-founder of Viking Press, gave him a manuscript copy of The Story of Ferdinand

The Story of Ferdinand

The Story of Ferdinand is the best known work written by American author Munro Leaf and illustrated by Robert Lawson. The children's book tells the story of a bull who would rather smell flowers than fight in bullfights...

 when he was nine years old. Guinzburg enjoyed the book so much that it convinced his father to publish the book and ended up selling four million copies, giving the young Guinzburg his first inkling that he might have a career in the publishing business. He attended the Hotchkiss School

Hotchkiss School

The Hotchkiss School is an independent, coeducational American college preparatory boarding school located in Lakeville, Connecticut. Founded in 1891, the school enrolls students in grades 9 through 12 and a small number of postgraduates...

 and served in the United States Marine Corps

United States Marine Corps

The United States Marine Corps is a branch of the United States Armed Forces responsible for providing power projection from the sea, using the mobility of the United States Navy to deliver combined-arms task forces rapidly. It is one of seven uniformed services of the United States...

, where he received the Purple Heart for action on Iwo Jima

Iwo Jima

Iwo Jima, officially , is an island of the Japanese Volcano Islands chain, which lie south of the Ogasawara Islands and together with them form the Ogasawara Archipelago. The island is located south of mainland Tokyo and administered as part of Ogasawara, one of eight villages of Tokyo...

. After completing his military service he attended Yale University

Yale University

Yale University is a private, Ivy League university located in New Haven, Connecticut, United States. Founded in 1701 in the Colony of Connecticut, the university is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States...

, where he was a member of Skull and Bones

Skull and Bones

Skull and Bones is an undergraduate senior or secret society at Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut. It is a traditional peer society to Scroll and Key and Wolf's Head, as the three senior class 'landed societies' at Yale....

 as well as the managing editor of the Yale Daily News

Yale Daily News

The Yale Daily News is an independent student newspaper published by Yale University students in New Haven, Connecticut since January 28, 1878...

 at the same time that William F. Buckley, Jr.

William F. Buckley, Jr.

William Frank Buckley, Jr. was an American conservative author and commentator. He founded the political magazine National Review in 1955, hosted 1,429 episodes of the television show Firing Line from 1966 until 1999, and was a nationally syndicated newspaper columnist. His writing was noted for...

 was editor.

Guinzburg visited Paris

Paris

Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...

 in the 1950s after graduating from Yale, joining other literatti such as Donald Hall

Donald Hall

Donald Hall is an American poet. He was appointed Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 2006.-Personal life:...

, Peter Matthiessen

Peter Matthiessen

Peter Matthiessen is a two-time National Book Award-winning American novelist and non-fiction writer, as well as an environmental activist...

, George Plimpton

George Plimpton

George Ames Plimpton was an American journalist, writer, editor, and actor. He is widely known for his sports writing and for helping to found The Paris Review.-Early life:...

 and William Styron

William Styron

William Clark Styron, Jr. was an American novelist and essayist who won major literary awards for his work.For much of his career, Styron was best known for his novels, which included...

. He joined with Matthiessen and Plimpton in 1953 to establish The Paris Review, an English-language literary magazine

Literary magazine

A literary magazine is a periodical devoted to literature in a broad sense. Literary magazines usually publish short stories, poetry and essays along with literary criticism, book reviews, biographical profiles of authors, interviews and letters...

 for "the good writers and good poets, the non-drumbeaters and non-axe grinders. So long as they're good" that is known for its author interviews about their writing craft and for helping launch the careers of such authors as T. Coraghessan Boyle

T. Coraghessan Boyle

Tom Coraghessan Boyle is a U.S. novelist and short story writer. Since the mid 1970s, he has published twelve novels and more than 100 short stories...

, Jack Kerouac

Jack Kerouac

Jean-Louis "Jack" Lebris de Kerouac was an American novelist and poet. He is considered a literary iconoclast and, alongside William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, a pioneer of the Beat Generation. Kerouac is recognized for his spontaneous method of writing, covering topics such as Catholic...

, V. S. Naipaul

V. S. Naipaul

Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad "V. S." Naipaul, TC is a Nobel prize-winning Indo-Trinidadian-British writer who is known for his novels focusing on the legacy of the British Empire's colonialism...

, Adrienne Rich

Adrienne Rich

Adrienne Cecile Rich is an American poet, essayist and feminist. She has been called "one of the most widely read and influential poets of the second half of the 20th century."-Early life:...

, Philip Roth

Philip Roth

Philip Milton Roth is an American novelist. He gained fame with the 1959 novella Goodbye, Columbus, an irreverent and humorous portrait of Jewish-American life that earned him a National Book Award...

 and Mona Simpson

Mona Simpson

Mona E. Simpson is an American author. She is a professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles and the Sadie Samuelson Levy Professor in Languages and Literature at Bard College. She won the Whiting Prize for her first novel, Anywhere but Here...

. Guinzburg was chosen as the Paris Reviews first managing editor, as he was the only one with and prior publishing experience, building on his time at the Yale Daily News. Editor Robert B. Silvers

Robert B. Silvers

Robert Benjamin Silvers is an American editor who has served as editor of The New York Review of Books since 1963. According to a 2007 Vanity Fair article, "Jason Epstein's assessment of Silvers as 'The most brilliant editor of a magazine ever to have worked in this country' has been 'shared by...

 of The New York Review of Books

The New York Review of Books

The New York Review of Books is a fortnightly magazine with articles on literature, culture and current affairs. Published in New York City, it takes as its point of departure that the discussion of important books is itself an indispensable literary activity...

 cited Guinzburg's "marvelous combination of idealist and realist" in which "He was always encouraging The Review not to be deterred from discovering young writers of quality" while always maintaining "a grasp of the really rough details of commercial publishing."

He joined the publicity department at Viking Press in 1954 and assumed the position of president after his father's death in 1961. Viking was purchased by Penguin Books

Penguin Books

Penguin Books is a publisher founded in 1935 by Sir Allen Lane and V.K. Krishna Menon. Penguin revolutionised publishing in the 1930s through its high quality, inexpensive paperbacks, sold through Woolworths and other high street stores for sixpence. Penguin's success demonstrated that large...

 in 1975 for a price estimated at $12 million. Guinzburg retained his title as president at the combined firm Viking/Penguin. Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis

Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis

Jacqueline Lee Bouvier "Jackie" Kennedy Onassis was the wife of the 35th President of the United States, John F. Kennedy, and served as First Lady of the United States during his presidency from 1961 until his assassination in 1963. Five years later she married Greek shipping magnate Aristotle...

, who he hired as an editor in 1975, joined other notable editors he brought to Viking, including Aaron Asher, Elisabeth Sifton and Corlies Smith. Onassis left the firm in 1977 after Viking published the Jeffrey Archer book Shall We Tell the President?

Shall We Tell the President?

Shall We Tell The President? is a 1977 book by English author Jeffrey Archer.In its original version, a plot to kill the president of the United States, Edward Kennedy, is foiled by an FBI agent working with the head of the FBI. A love story complicates the plot. The book includes descriptive...

, a fictional political thriller that depicted an assassination plot against U.S. President Ted Kennedy

Ted Kennedy

Edward Moore "Ted" Kennedy was a United States Senator from Massachusetts and a member of the Democratic Party. Serving almost 47 years, he was the second most senior member of the Senate when he died and is the fourth-longest-serving senator in United States history...

.Among the many literary prizes awarded to Viking authors during his tenure as President were eight National Book Awards, three Pulitzer Prizes, and two Nobel Prizes in literature. Guinzburg published books by Saul Bellow

Saul Bellow

Saul Bellow was a Canadian-born Jewish American writer. For his literary contributions, Bellow was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, the Nobel Prize for Literature, and the National Medal of Arts...

, Kingsley Amis

Kingsley Amis

Sir Kingsley William Amis, CBE was an English novelist, poet, critic, and teacher. He wrote more than 20 novels, six volumes of poetry, a memoir, various short stories, radio and television scripts, along with works of social and literary criticism...

, Rebecca West

Rebecca West

Cicely Isabel Fairfield , known by her pen name Rebecca West, or Dame Rebecca West, DBE was an English author, journalist, literary critic and travel writer. A prolific, protean author who wrote in many genres, West was committed to feminist and liberal principles and was one of the foremost public...

, Nadine Gordimer

Nadine Gordimer

Nadine Gordimer is a South African writer and political activist. She was awarded the 1991 Nobel Prize in Literature when she was recognised as a woman "who through her magnificent epic writing has – in the words of Alfred Nobel – been of very great benefit to humanity".Her writing has long dealt...

, Graham Greene

Graham Greene

Henry Graham Greene, OM, CH was an English author, playwright and literary critic. His works explore the ambivalent moral and political issues of the modern world...

, Wallace Stegner

Wallace Stegner

Wallace Earle Stegner was an American historian, novelist, short story writer, and environmentalist, often called "The Dean of Western Writers"...

, John Ashberry, Arthur Miller

Arthur Miller

Arthur Asher Miller was an American playwright and essayist. He was a prominent figure in American theatre, writing dramas that include plays such as All My Sons , Death of a Salesman , The Crucible , and A View from the Bridge .Miller was often in the public eye,...

, Hannah Arendt

Hannah Arendt

Hannah Arendt was a German American political theorist. She has often been described as a philosopher, although she refused that label on the grounds that philosophy is concerned with "man in the singular." She described herself instead as a political theorist because her work centers on the fact...

, Malcolm Cowley

Malcolm Cowley

Malcolm Cowley was an American novelist, poet, literary critic, and journalist.-Early life:...

, Jimmy Breslin

Jimmy Breslin

Jimmy Breslin is an American journalist and author. He currently writes a column for the New York Daily News' Sunday edition. He has written numerous novels, and columns of his have appeared regularly in various newspapers in his hometown of New York City...

, Jack Kerouac

Jack Kerouac

Jean-Louis "Jack" Lebris de Kerouac was an American novelist and poet. He is considered a literary iconoclast and, alongside William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, a pioneer of the Beat Generation. Kerouac is recognized for his spontaneous method of writing, covering topics such as Catholic...

, Ken Kesey

Ken Kesey

Kenneth Elton "Ken" Kesey was an American author, best known for his novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest , and as a counter-cultural figure who considered himself a link between the Beat Generation of the 1950s and the hippies of the 1960s. "I was too young to be a beatnik, and too old to be a...

, Iris Murdoch

Iris Murdoch

Dame Iris Murdoch DBE was an Irish-born British author and philosopher, best known for her novels about political and social questions of good and evil, sexual relationships, morality, and the power of the unconscious...

 and John Steinbeck

John Steinbeck

John Ernst Steinbeck, Jr. was an American writer. He is widely known for the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Grapes of Wrath and East of Eden and the novella Of Mice and Men...

 who was the Best Man at his wedding to Rusty Unger. He published Gravity's Rainbow

Gravity's Rainbow

Gravity's Rainbow is a postmodern novel written by Thomas Pynchon and first published on February 28, 1973.The narrative is set primarily in Europe at the end of World War II and centers on the design, production and dispatch of V-2 rockets by the German military, and, in particular, the quest...

, the 1973 book by Thomas Pynchon

Thomas Pynchon

Thomas Ruggles Pynchon, Jr. is an American novelist. For his most praised novel, Gravity's Rainbow, Pynchon received the National Book Award, and is regularly cited as a contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature...

, which won the National Book Award

National Book Award

The National Book Awards are a set of American literary awards. Started in 1950, the Awards are presented annually to American authors for literature published in the current year. In 1989 the National Book Foundation, a nonprofit organization which now oversees and manages the National Book...

 the following year. As a now infamous stunt, Guinzburg had Professor Irwin Corey accept the award on Pynchon's behalf, delivering a hilarious stream-of-consciousness speech in which he referred to the author as "Richard Python".

Guinzburg was an active philanthropist, sponsoring and working intensively with an inner city high school class as part of Eugene Lang

Eugene Lang

Eugene M. "Gene" Lang is an American philanthropist who founded REFAC Technology Development Corporation in 1951. He created the I Have A Dream Foundation in 1981, and Project Pericles in 2001. He has also made large donations to Swarthmore College, The New School's undergraduate liberal arts...

's I Have a Dream Foundation and founding The Dream Team of Memorial Sloan–Kettering Cancer Center. which fulfills wishes of adult cancer patients.

Guinzburg died in Manhattan at age 84 on September 8, 2010, due to complications

Complication (medicine)

Complication, in medicine, is an unfavorable evolution of a disease, a health condition or a medical treatment. The disease can become worse in its severity or show a higher number of signs, symptoms or new pathological changes, become widespread throughout the body or affect other organ systems. A...

 of Heart bypass surgery. He was survived by a companion of 15 years, Victoria Anstead, two granddaughters, a daughter Kate and a son Michael from his first wife, actress Rita Gam

Rita Gam

Rita Gam is an American film and television actress and documentary film maker. She was nominated for a Golden Globe and won the Silver Bear for Best Actress.-Career:...

, whom he married in 1956. He was also survived by a daughter, Amanda Guinzburg, from his second marriage to writer Rusty Unger.