Starling Lawrence, a courtly pencil-wielding editor whose keen eye for riveting narratives transformed Michael Lewis, Patrick O’Brian, Sebastian Junger and many others into best-selling authors, died on Thursday in Manhattan. He was 82.
His daughter, Dune Lawrence, said he died in a hospital from complications of a head injury he suffered in a fall in April.
For more than five decades at W.W. Norton & Company, Mr. Lawrence waded into the so-called slush pile of unsolicited manuscripts to discover unsung authors and to help fashion sometimes amorphous antecedents into sizzling, culturally significant potboilers.
“It is remarkable in hindsight that for two of the most important books I ever acquired, Sebastian Junger’s ‘The Perfect Storm’ and Michael Lewis’s ‘Liar’s Poker,’ there were no other offers on the table,” he once said.
Mr. Lawrence bought “Liar’s Poker,” about Mr. Lewis’s experience as a bond salesman, for $40,000. He remained Mr. Lewis’s editor for 35 years, overseeing one blockbuster after another, including “The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine” (2010), about the bursting housing bubble; “Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game” (2003), about the general manager of the Oakland Athletics and his statistical secret to baseball success; “The Premonition” (2021), about the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic; and 13 other books.
“I was 26 years old and still at Salomon Brothers when I wandered into Norton with a book proposal for a stodgy history of Wall Street,” Mr. Lewis said in an interview. “Star teased out of me a memoir that scandalized Wall Street and made me persona non grata there for nearly a decade.”
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The post Starling Lawrence, Editor Who Uncovered Best Sellers, Dies at 82 appeared first on New York Times.
