Schiffrin, rebel of corporate publishing, dies

[December 02, 2013]  PARIS (AP) — Andre Schiffrin, who was expelled from the corporate publishing world after fostering the likes of Art Spiegelman, Jean-Paul Sartre, Studs Terkel and Noam Chomsky, has died in Paris.

The New Press, a nonprofit publisher that Schiffrin founded after he was forced out of Pantheon Books in 1990 over the high-brow imprint's slender bottom line, said he died Sunday of pancreatic cancer. He was 78.

Schiffrin argued that corporate control was incompatible with literature and threatened free expression, a view that ultimately cost him his job at the imprint where his father had been founding editor after the family fled Nazi-occupied France in 1940.

In interviews after his highly public departure, Schiffrin said he feared for the future of independent ideas in a publishing world increasingly driven by advertising and profits.

[Associated Press]

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