Tom Maschler, the swashbuckling British publisher who fostered the literary careers of more than a dozen Nobel laureates and conceived the coveted Booker Prize to promote fiction, died on Oct. 15 in a hospital near his home in Luberon, in southeastern France. His death was confirmed by the Central Hospital of Apt, about 40 miles east of Avignon. A Jewish refugee from Nazi-occupied Vienna, where his father was a publisher, Mr. Maschler was 26 in 1960 when he was named literary director of Jonathan Cape, the prominent London publishing firm, a month after the death of its founder. He catapulted to early fame by buying the British rights to Joseph Heller’s debut novel, “Catch-22,” for a bargain 250 pounds in 1961 (the equivalent of about $700 then and about $6,500 today), and, the next year, by transplanting himself to Idaho shortly after the suicide of Ernest Hemingway to help Hemingway’s widow, Mary, prepare the novelist’s memoir “A Moveable Feast” for publication. Among the authors Mr. Maschler discovered, incubated or published and who would win the Nobel Prize in Literature were Gabriel García Márquez (“the greatest writer I have published ever,” he once said), Nadine Gordimer, Doris Lessing, Mario Vargas Llosa and V.S.

Source: New York Times October 23, 2020 16:18 UTC