Ann Godoff, a percipient editor and intuitive publisher who cultivated the careers of dozens of novelists and nonfiction authors for more than three decades as the head of Random House and then of Penguin Press, died on Tuesday in Albany, N.Y. She was 76.
Her death, in a hospital, was from complications of bone cancer, her partner, Annik LaFarge, said. Ms. Godoff lived in Hudson, N.Y.
Ms. Godoff spent her career wooing and nurturing literary novices and veterans alike. Her more celebrated authors included Ron Chernow, E.L. Doctorow, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Thomas Pynchon, Tom Brokaw, Salman Rushdie, Zadie Smith, William Styron and Alice Waters. The literary agent Esther Newberg called her “an author’s publisher.”
At Random House, Ms. Godoff was named executive editor in 1991 and rose to editor in chief and publisher of its trade publishing group before being famously fired in a corporate restructuring in 2003. At Penguin Press, the American hardcover imprint she founded soon afterward, she was editor in chief and publisher.
Many of the books she shepherded into print became best sellers, among them John Berendt’s “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil” (1994) and Caleb Carr’s “The Alienist” (1995), both surprise blockbusters.
More recently, she edited and published three top sellers: the memoir “A Hymn to Life,” by Gisèle Pelicot, the Frenchwoman whose husband at the time and dozens of other men were convicted of raping her in a trial that made global headlines; “Young Man in a Hurry,” a memoir by Gov. Gavin Newsom of California; and Michael Pollan’s “A World Appears: A Journey Into Consciousness.”
One of the last books she edited was a memoir by Frank Rich, the former critic and columnist for The New York Times; it’s slated to be published next year.
Ms. Godoff was known for making big bets on celebrity authors, including a mammoth advance of $8.5 million to Alan Greenspan, the former Federal Reserve Board chairman, whose memoir, “The Age of Turbulence,” became a New York Times hardcover nonfiction best seller in 2007.
Bill Shore, who wrote the self-help book “The Cathedral Within: Transforming Your Life by Giving Something Back” (1999), recalled meeting with Ms. Godoff to propose that book.
“Ann Godoff described the book she’d like to see written, the book she said she’d want to read,” Mr. Shore said. “She went into what I could only describe as a literary jazz riff for about 20 minutes. Her tempo increased as she spoke. She concluded by saying, ‘So, if that’s what you want to write, if you want to write a book about the cathedral within, then that’s a book I want to buy.’”
Mr. Chernow, whom Ms. Godoff persuaded to write what became a best-selling biography of John D. Rockefeller, said: “I always saw Ann as a double threat: an astute editor but also a superb publisher. She not only had a flawless sense of what would sell and what wouldn’t, but a gift for how to position a book in a crowded literary marketplace.”
Holding her in such high esteem, the publishing world was stunned in 2003 when she was let go by Bertelsmann, the German conglomerate that bought Random House in 1998, her job eliminated in a corporate shake-up. As she left, Peter Olson, the company’s chairman, delivered a blunt public verdict, saying that her Random House Trade Group had “been the only Random House Inc. publishing division to consistently fall short of their annual profitability targets.”
Known within the company as “Little Random,” the trade group had faced some formidable competitors, including an internal rival, Sonny Mehta’s Knopf imprint. Moreover, as Ms. Godoff frequently complained, during much of her tenure her house did not have its own division to produce paperbacks, which typically generate revenue from previously published titles.
Authors had become so loyal to Ms. Godoff that more than two dozen left Random House when she did. She started her own imprint at Penguin just eight days later.
“Ann influenced generations of editors and publishers by showing us, through her example, that you can champion works of cultural significance while still being commercially successful,” said Jonathan Karp, a former Random House editor in chief and a former publisher, president and chief executive of Simon & Schuster.
He added, “If there were a Hall of Fame for book publishing, Ann would be voted in on the first ballot.”
Ann Leslie Godoff was born on July 22, 1949, in Manhattan to Boris and Marilyn (Rosenstock) Godoff. Her paternal grandfather was a Jewish immigrant from Russia. Her father, a trained classical pianist, owned a business that printed album covers for major record companies. Her mother was a buyer for the fashion industry.
The family moved to Los Angeles in 1957 but returned to New York about a decade later, uprooting Ann from Beverly Hills High School. After graduating from the Calhoun School in Manhattan, she enrolled at Bennington College in Vermont, but transferred (“too many trees” for an urbanite, she explained) to New York University. She graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in film in 1972.
Her early career was varied and peripatetic. She served tea to radio department colleagues at the BBC in London; tended bar in St. Thomas, in the Caribbean; drafted provocative questions for the TV psychologist Dr. Joyce Brothers from the studio audience; studied architecture for a time; produced TV commercials for an advertising agency; and sold Oldsmobiles at a West Side dealership in Manhattan until she was hired part-time to type mailing labels for Alice Mayhew, a formidable editor at Simon & Schuster.
Ms. Godoff later joined the house’s editing ranks and was ultimately promoted to senior editor. She worked for Simon & Schuster from 1980 to 1986, when the Atlantic Monthly Press hired her away to be its editor in chief. She joined Random House in 1991, becoming its executive editor, a post she held until 1996, and then president and editor in chief until 2003.
Her marriage to Malcolm Drummond in 1973 ended in divorce in 2012. That year, she married Ms. LaFarge, an editor, author and photographer. In addition to her, Ms. Godoff is survived by a brother, Peter Godoff.
“My favorite story about Ann,” Ms. LaFarge said, occurred in California in 1960 when Ms. Godoff’s mother helped host a fund-raiser for John F. Kennedy’s presidential campaign at the home of the actor Tony Curtis.
“Someone had the idea to pose young Ann — she was 11 — at the end of the diving board of the pool, and Frank Sinatra sang to her ‘Thank Heaven for Little Girls,’” Ms. LaFarge said. “I can just imagine her face as he sang, ‘Those little eyes so helpless and appealing / One day will flash / And send you crashing through the ceiling.’”
“For all her formidable prowess,” Ms. LaFarge added, “she’ll always be, for me, the little girl at the edge of the diving board.”
Sam Roberts is an obituaries reporter for The Times, writing mini-biographies about the lives of remarkable people.
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