Richard E. Snyder, 93, deceased; Drove Simon & Schuster to new heights

Richard E. Snyder, the imperious publisher who built Simon & Schuster into the nation’s largest book publisher, died Tuesday at his home in Los Angeles. He was 90.

The cause was heart failure, said his son Matthew, who lives in California and his father had moved there because his health was deteriorating with sepsis and other issues.

Through unvarnished ambition, tenacity and gut feeling, and without ever becoming a committed reader himself, Mr. Snyder helped transform a New York-based industry of club literary connoisseurs into a global corporation of conglomerates led by celebrity moguls.

He acquired numerous companies, including Macmillan and leading educational publishers. He recruited as authors Watergate reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, former President Ronald Reagan, Reverend Jesse L. Jackson, Graham Greene, Larry McMurtry, Joan Didion, Philip Roth, Mary Higgins Clark, Joseph Heller, Mario Puzo, and David McCullough. .

And he enlisted Alice Mayhew, Michael Korda, Jim Silberman, and Nan Talese as top editors, then generally guided by their professional judgment.

Mr. Snyder, who came into contact with book publishing as a young graduate, began working at Simon & Schuster in 1960. He served as president from 1975 to 1986, chief executive from 1978 to 1994, and chairman from 1986 to 1994.

By 1994, annual sales had increased from $40 million in 1975 to $2 billion. During his tenure, the company’s trade book division won at least half a dozen Pulitzer Prizes.

Considered a dynamo within the publishing world, Mr. Snyder was probably best known to the public for two high-profile episodes: his acrimonious 1990 divorce from Joni Evans, whom he had taken on at Simon & Schuster and who had become a pioneer for women in a male-dominated publishing culture; and his abrupt resignation from Simon & Schuster in 1994 following Viacom’s acquisition of the company.

Saddled with debt from the purchase, Viacom began to divest itself of the subsidiaries Mr. Snyder had acquired to make Simon & Schuster a success.

Mr. Snyder was distinguished by his trademark tinted aviator glasses, his barely legible handwriting, his Brooklyn accent, and his temper. While some former employees remembered him as a valuable mentor—Mr. Woodward and Mr. Bernstein would describe him as “fatherly”—Mr. Snyder never won any personality contests.

“There is a tendency to only see the dark side of Dick,” Mr. Korda, a friend and colleague for decades, said in a telephone interview, “but he really was a visionary who to some extent revolutionized the publishing house. He was a rather radical innovator and led the way for book publishing from a private cottage industry to a real business in which it was possible for people to work and earn a living.”

In his book “Another Life: A Memoir of Other People” (1999), Mr. Korda wrote of Mr. Snyder: an explosion of rage by sheer force of will.”

“You also guessed that his bark and his bite were probably equally obnoxious,” added Mr. Korda, “particularly when it came to ill-prepared or sloppy work or an unwillingness to go the extra mile.”

Charles Hayward, who left Simon & Schuster to become president of Little, Brown, was quoted in The New York Times Magazine in 1995 as saying that “it was part of Dick’s style to use degradation and humiliation to control people. “

But Paul D. Neuthaler, the former CEO of Bantam Doubleday Dell and a former colleague, said in an interview that Mr. Snyder was “a genius publisher and my favorite tough guy and mentor.” And Susan Kamil, who worked for Mrs. Evans at Simon & Schuster and later joined Random House, was quoted by New York magazine in 1987 as saying that Mr. Snyder “taught me everything — not just business lessons, life lessons — and I will always be grateful to you.”

In a statement issued after the death of Mr. Snyder, said Mr. Woodward and Mr. Bernstein, who Mr. Snyder to write their signature Watergate-era books, “All the President’s Men” (1974) and “The Final Days” (1976), said, “We chose to publish with Dick because of his dedication to the unfettered truth and his promise that he would support us no matter where the Watergate story led.”

Richard Elliot Snyder, known as Dick, was born in Brooklyn on April 6, 1933 to Jack and Molly (Rothman) Snyder. His father owned a men’s overcoat business.

After attending Adelphi Academy in Brooklyn and graduating from Tufts University in 1955, he was drafted into the army. He expected to join his father’s clothing company, but, as he told Roger Rosenblatt for The Times Magazine profile in 1995, when he showed up at work, his father showed him the door and said, “Better get a son than a partner.”

When a friend went for an interview at Doubleday in Manhattan, Mr. Snyder tagged along and was soon hired as an intern. He was appointed assistant director of marketing in 1958 after demonstrating that he was one of the few people at Doubleday who knew exactly how many books had been published, ordered, sold and returned in a given period of time – a skill he compared to feeling from his father. for the value of fabric for overcoats.

“He could rub the fabric of a coat between his thumb and forefinger,” said Mr Snyder in The Times Magazine profile, “and proclaim in a second, ‘$3.34 a yard’. He would be entitled to the penny I had that gift of feeling when it came to books.

In a climate that Mr. Snyder helped create, he called himself a businessman rather than a man of letters. As Mr. Korda put it, “There is no law that says publishers must read books; Dick had a great instinct to rely on his editors.

Mr. Snyder’s three other marriages, to Ruth Freund, Laura Yorke, and Terresa Liu, also ended in divorce. Besides his son Matthew, from his marriage to Mrs. Freund, he is survived by a daughter from that marriage, Jackie; two other sons, Richard Elliott Snyder Jr. and Coleman Yorke, from his marriage to Mrs. Yorke; and two grandchildren.

Mr. Snyder prospered under the ownership of Simon & Schuster by Gulf and Western Industries, who bought the company in 1975. But when owner founder and chairman Charles G. Bludhorn died in 1983 and was succeeded by Martin Davis, an executive at Paramount Pictures, a subsidiary of Gulf and Western, Mr. Snyder feuded with him. At one point, Mr. Davis his advice to invest in an educational publishing company that was offered at a high retail price.

After being fired from Viacom, Mr. Snyder formed an investment group that acquired Western Publishing and its children’s publishing company, Golden Books, in 1996. But turning the business around proved problematic and it was sold.

At the request of Norman Mailer, Mr. Snyder was instrumental in reviving International PEN, which promotes literature and free speech, and helped establish the foundation that gives the National Book Awards.

Mr. Snyder never denied that he was a hard taskmaster, but, he said, he demanded no more of others than of himself.

“Ninety-nine percent of the people in this industry are highly intelligent, so quality doesn’t distinguish anyone,” he told The Times in 1979. “The people who succeed are the ones with the greatest dedication. Maybe it’s a neurotic commitment I’m looking for, the person who spends the last five minutes on a task. You want someone who does something that is impossible and the next day is afraid he can’t duplicate it.”

Reinforcing his self-analysis, Mr. Snyder explained another aspect of his clumsy behavior, which he attributed to his upbringing as a hyperactive only child and sketchy college student who had been raised in a house with no books by parents whose primary passion was playing gin rummy.

“I was quite rebellious and I think my parents thought I was on the wrong track,” he said. “They were very indulgent, and I think I kept wishing they had exercised more authority. I can remember going to “Annie Hall” with Joni when it opened. There was that great line when Woody Allen gets a ticket from a cop, tears it up and says, “It’s not your fault, I just can’t deal with authority.”

“I poked Joni and said, ‘That was me.'”