Ann Harris, Who Edited a Stack of Best Sellers, Dies at 99

New York Times

2 days ago

In 1969, after a career writing comedic novels and screenplays, William Peter Blatty wrangled a $10,000 advance to write a decidedly unfunny book, 'The Exorcist.'
He wrote a manuscript so scary, he would later tell a British newspaper, that his secretary 'was too spooked to work on it when she was alone in the house.'
Before the novel could be published, though, the finer points of plot, character and demonic possession had to be shaped by an editor. The job went to the fastidious Ann Schakne Harris, who in the 1960s was among a group of women to gain recognition for their burnishing skills at Manhattan's publishing houses.
For six weeks, Mr. Blatty and Ms. Harris bivouacked at a hotel in New York to sculpt the novel that became the defining entry in a hybrid genre that The New York Times called 'theological horror.'
'The Exorcist,' published in 1971 by Harper & Row (now HarperCollins), became one of the best-selling novels of the decade and sold 13 million copies in the United States. Mr. Blatty died in 2017.
Ms. Harris died on June 1 at her home in Manhattan, her daughter Katherine Harris said. She was 99.
'The Exorcist' was her breakthrough after she was in and out of the book business for 20 years, assisting other editors, working part time while raising two children. She was happy in that role, she said, but acknowledged that it 'was a heady thing to have a great big best seller.'
'From the beginning, I knew absolutely that it was going to the top of the list,' Ms. Harris said in Al Silverman's 'The Time of Their Lives: The Golden Age of Great American Book Publishers, Their Editors, and Authors' (2008). 'And I knew that I could make it happen.'
A raft of best sellers attended her six-decade career. Among them were 'The Thorn Birds' (1977) by the Australian writer Colleen McCullough; Stephen Hawking's 'A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes' (1988); autobiographies of Betty Ford and Warren Buffett; a smuggled manuscript by the Soviet-era composer Dmitri Shostakovich; and two Pulitzer Prize winners — 'Why Survive? Being Old in America' (1975) by Dr. Robert N. Butler, and 'Toms River: A Story of Science and Salvation' (2013) by Dan Fagin.
'The Thorn Birds,' a generational family saga set in the Australian Outback, was a particular triumph for Ms. Harris. She had essentially discovered Ms. McCullough, who was then a professor and researcher at Yale University.
Ms. Harris had acquired Ms. McCullough's first novel, the modestly successful 'Tim' (1974). For 'The Thorn Birds,' Ms. Harris immersed herself in the editing process, as she had with Mr. Blatty. Ms. McCullough would travel to Manhattan from New Haven, Conn., sometimes staying at the Harris family's apartment while they smoothed the novel's contours.
In a dedication to Ms. Harris, her son Nicholas Harris said in an interview, Ms. McCullough wrote that the collaboration was 'hard' and 'painful' but invaluable.
The Times gave 'The Thorn Birds' — sometimes called the American 'Gone With the Wind' — a mixed review, but it had sold more than 30 million copies worldwide by 2015, when Ms. McCullough died at age 77. The paperback rights sold at auction for $1.9 million, then a record.
To edit Ms. McCullough's third novel, 'An Indecent Obsession' (1981), Ms. Harris traveled nearly 9,000 miles to Norfolk Island, an Australian territory in the Pacific, and spent six weeks with the author.
'She was a classic, old-style editor,' Frances McCullough, who worked with Ms. Harris as an editor at Harper & Row, said in an interview. 'She took time and pains with authors.'
Today, Ms. McCullough said, 'books that need that kind of intense attention tend to be farmed out to freelance editors, who can work on them full time.'
The author Stephen Fried, who wrote four books for Ms. Harris, said her editing style was 'active but not aggressive' as she guided writers to make changes in their own voice.
He called her nurturing and invariably excited about new ideas, even if trendiness was not immediately suggested by her schoolmarmish appearance. 'She was like if your grandma read everything and knew everything,' Mr. Fried said in an interview.
Ann Schakne was born in Manhattan on Sept. 22, 1925. Her father, Harry Schakne, worked at his in-laws' dressmaking business and earlier ran a Jewish newspaper in Detroit. Her mother, Alice (Siegel) Schakne, was a schoolteacher.
Ann's interest in medicine as a teenager was impeded by a lack of affinity for chemistry, putting her on course for publishing. She graduated from Hunter College in New York in 1946 with a bachelor's degree in English and received her master's degree from Radcliffe College in 1948, having taken its inaugural publishing course to learn the basics of editing, sales, cover design and publicity.
In 1952, she entered the publishing business as a 'reader,' evaluating manuscripts. By the mid-1960s, she had become an editor. In 1980, Ms. Harris left Harper & Row and later that decade joined Bantam, where she edited Dr. Hawking's hugely popular, layman-accessible 'A Brief History of Time.'
It sold 10 million copies but her working relationship with Dr. Hawking, the renowned University of Cambridge physicist who died in 2018 after a decades-long struggle with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, was described by some as complicated.
For a subsequent book, 'The Universe in a Nutshell' (2001), an apparently frustrated Ms. Harris sent 'a disorganized collection' of Dr. Hawking's writings to Kitty Ferguson, his biographer, asking if it could be assembled into a coherent manuscript, as recounted by Declan Fahy in 'The New Celebrity Scientists' (2015).
For one of the Hawking books that their mother edited, Katherine and Nicholas Harris said, a disagreement arose between Ms. Harris and the physicist. A computational error was discovered when the book was sent for peer review, Katherine Harris said, and her mother insisted that it not be distributed until a correction was made.
'Hawking was furious,' she said in an interview. 'As far as I know, he never forgave her.'
However, Beth Rashbaum, who edited Dr. Hawking after Ms. Harris left Bantam, and Leonard Mlodinow, a collaborator of Dr. Hawking's, said they did not recall any tensions between the two of them.
So captivated was Ms. Harris by Dr. Butler's Pulitzer-winning book about aging in the mid-1970s, she left publishing briefly to work at a longevity clinic he established in 1990 at Mount Sinai Medical Center.
(When Ms. Harris was in her 40s, Katherine Harris said, she scrubbed every public reference to her age that she could find. 'Her only plan for retirement was not to retire,' she said.)
Along with her daughter and son, Ms. Harris is survived by three grandchildren. Her husband Cyril M. Harris, an acoustical engineer who shaped the sound of many important concert halls, died in 2011. They married in 1949.
Her second Pulitzer-winning book, Mr. Fagin's 'Toms River,' was one she acquired, but she retired before it was published by Bantam in 2013. Still, Ms. Harris helped to define the book, Mr. Fagin said in an interview.
As he wrestled with whether to tell a local story about chemical leaks, smokestack belches and cancer in a New Jersey town or to more broadly examine the environment and chronic disease, she urged him to 'think big.'
'She believed in the power of books to tell big stories and make a big difference,' Mr. Fagin said.