NEW YORK – Richard Snyder, a visionary and imperious executive at Simon & Schuster who with bold style guided the publisher’s exponential rise in the second half of the 20th century and helped shape an era of consolidation and growing corporate power, has died. He was 90.
Snyder died Tuesday at his home in Los Angeles, according to his son Matthew Snyder, who said his health was failing.
“Dick Snyder has guided Simon & Schuster through some of its most historic and eventful years,” the company said in a statement on Wednesday. “He built Simon & Schuster into one of the largest and most influential publishers in the world, known for making headlines. We produce non-fiction, bestselling fiction and timeless classics.”
Snyder was among those who helped transform the industry. When he joined Simon & Schuster as a sales assistant in the early 1960s, the publishers were mostly privately owned, with some still managed by their founders. By the time Viacom ousted it in 1994, Simon & Schuster and competitors like Random House and HarperCollins were company-owned and had bought out numerous former competitors.
As President of Simon & Schuster Inc. from 1975 and CEO from 1978 to 1994, Snyder built a modern company that was sometimes too modern for the world of books. Simon & Schuster’s revenues multiplied from around $40 million a year in the 1970s to over $2 billion by the mid-1990s, making the company the largest publisher in the country at the time, a position it holds today Penguin Random House.
Best-sellers during Snyder’s reign included Mary Higgins Clark’s crime thrillers and Pulitzer Prize-winning films such as David McCullough’s Truman and Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove. Snyder was also an early proponent of electronic publishing and the computerization of business processes, and he greatly expanded Simon & Schuster, buying educational companies such as Prentice Hall and Esquire Inc., spending more than $1 billion on acquisitions in total.
“You can’t be a publisher anymore without also being a businessman,” Snyder told the New York Times in 1984. “The thought that you can publish just because you love books is a sure recipe for failure.”
Those who knew him couldn’t help but talk about him. The New Yorker dubbed him a “warrior king,” and former Simon & Schuster editor Robert Gottlieb recalled his “Ahab-like determination to see Simon & Schuster outgrow Random House.” Colleagues who left the company shared tales of his profane, vocal tirades, though Gottlieb noted that “this notoriously difficult man could inspire loyalty, respect, and even affection.” Another editor of Simon & Schuster, Michael Korda, wrote of Snyder’s “shallow” commitment to literary fiction – because “most of it costs money”.
Simon & Schuster published Philip Roth, Graham Greene, and Joan Didion, among others, and Snyder played a direct role in making the company a popular home for insider stories about Washington. In the fall of 1972, as the Watergate scandal was gaining momentum, Snyder personally lobbied Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein for a book about their pioneering journalism that later became All the President’s Men. He met them at the Hay-Adams Hotel in Washington on a day when they were wrong about an important fact about President Nixon’s chief of staff HR Haldeman, and convinced them to publish with Simon & Schuster – despite a rival offering more money.
“Dick looked us straight in the eye and was very direct and I felt like we would have his full support,” Woodward told The New York Times in 1992. “I was right. If he’d ever ducked or twitched or blinked, I’d say so. But he never did. He is brave. He cares. He always does what he says. And he’s hard, hard, hard.
Released in June 1974, two months before Nixon’s resignation, All the President’s Men was a milestone in American publishing, a book-length investigation into a sitting President and his administration. It spent months on best-seller lists, was adapted into an Oscar-winning film of the same name, and helped spark a wave of contemporary political publications — including Woodward’s “Final Days” and Bernstein’s coda to the Nixon years — that continues to this day Day.
“With surefire instinct, Dick made ‘All the President’s Men’ not only newsworthy but news,” Korda wrote in his 1999 memoir Another Life. “That’s what the French call ‘Les Actualities’, news as it happens.”
Woodward and Bernstein remembered Snyder as a publisher who always stood by them.
“Dick was brave and he was tough — a visionary who understood that, like our great Washington Post editor, Ben Bradlee, the responsibility rested with him — and he would never waver, even under threats from an incumbent president,” they said in a joint statement on Wednesday. “This commitment also led to an enduring friendship as a mentor and a shared presence for us throughout Dick’s life.”
Simon & Schuster eventually signed memoirs of fallen Nixon officials such as John Dean, John Ehrlichman and John Mitchell, as well as books by Nixon himself and Ronald Reagan, whose memoirs were published just months before Simon & Schuster published Kitty Kelley’s infamous Nancy Reagan . ‘ suggesting the former first lady was having an affair with Frank Sinatra. Woodward has remained loyal to Simon & Schuster for decades, and his long-time #1 sellers include “Veil,” “Plan of Attack,” and Trump-era “Fear.” Some of the country’s most popular historians, including McCullough and Pulitzer winner Doris Kearns Goodwin, were longtime Simon & Schuster authors.
Snyder rose and fell through the hard and random rules of corporate culture. His power grew as the company changed hands and organization several times, but shortly after Viacom bought Simon & Schuster in 1994, he was fired for not being a “team player” and his career never recovered. He tried to revive the children’s book publisher Golden Books, where he worked early in his career, but the company went bankrupt and was sold within a few years.
Snyder also sponsored a lecture series at his alma mater, Tufts University, with Woodward among the speakers. In the late 1980s he helped establish the non-profit National Book Foundation, which awards the National Book Awards.
He had four children and was married four times, most recently to Terresa Liu Snyder, whom he later sued, claiming she stole millions of dollars from him and left him in a bad financial position.
Snyder’s most notable marriage was to Joni Evans, a colleague in the publishing industry. Her decade as one of the industry’s leading power couples — Korda dubbed them the “Prince Charles and Lady Di” of the book world — ended in a very public divorce in the late 1980s.
Brooklyn-born Snyder remembered himself as a poor college student in a house with no books, expecting to go into his father’s coat business. When his father turned him down, he instead found employment as a trainee with Doubleday, where he excelled at dealing with numbers and the fine print of contracts. Within two years he was with Simon & Schuster. Doubleday fired him, he later told the Times, for “telling them how wrong they were doing things.”
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This story has been corrected to show that Snyder became President in 1975.
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