Penguin Press founder Ann Godoff, a powerhouse editor of bestsellers and prize winners, dies at 76

NEW YORK (AP) — Ann Godoff, a leading book publisher for more than 30 years with an eye for timely and timeless works from “Alexander Hamilton” and “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil” to current bestsellers by Gisèle Pelicot and California Gov. Gavin Newsom, has died. She was 76.

Godoff died of cancer Tuesday in Albany, New York, according to a statement from Penguin Press, which she had founded in 2003.

“Ann’s impact on American book culture over the past four decades is incalculable,” Penguin Press publisher Scott Moyers said in a statement. “An editor of immense range in fiction, nonfiction and poetry, Ann shepherded into print innumerable New York Times bestsellers, multiple winners of every major award, and works that have appeared on all manner of best books lists — of the year, the decade, and the century.”

A onetime NYU film student who studied under then-faculty member Martin Scorsese, sold cars and assisted on Dr. Joyce Brothers’ television show, Godoff was a late bloomer who didn’t begin her publishing career until her early 30s and soon revealed uncommon gifts for spotting and cultivating talent. As a rising editor at Random House in the 1990s, she published such debut phenomena as John Berendt’s “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil” and Caleb Carr’s “The Alienist.”

She also worked with Salman Rushdie, E.L. Doctorow and Arundhati Roy and had lasting relationships with Michael Pollan and Ron Chernow, whose books with Godoff have included a Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of George Washington and the Hamilton biography that was the basis for the prize-winning stage musical.

“Ann supervised me with a rather light touch and never got lost in the details,” Chernow wrote in an email to The Associated Press.

“She was no less gifted in fashioning a design for the book — everything from the cover art to the paper stock — with a look fully consistent with my portrait of the character,” he added. “Everything was of a piece and that was carried straight through to the marketing and publicity. I always felt myself in the most capable hands.”

Godoff was eventually promoted to president and editor in chief of Random House, and her stature was so high that when she was forced out in 2003 amid corporate restructuring, her departure set off debates — evergreen in the industry — over the feared decline of literary publishing.

But Penguin soon signed her up to lead the new Penguin Press imprint. Chernow, Pollan and other authors moved there with her, and she continued to publish bestsellers and critical favorites, including such Pulitzer Prize winners as Steve Coll’s “Ghost Wars” and John Lewis Gaddis’ “George F. Kennan.”

When Random House and Penguin merged into Penguin Random House in 2013, Godoff was under the same roof as her old company. Right up to the time of her death, she was shaping the public conversation. Pelicot’s “A Hymn to Life” recounts her horrifying marriage and how she came to be a leading voice against sexual violence, while Newsom’s “Young Man in a Hurry” is widely seen as a building block for a 2028 presidential run.

Godoff was born in 1949 in New York City, grew up in New York and California, and graduated from Bennington College. She started out at Simon & Schuster in the early 1980s as an assistant to Alice Mayhew, the renowned editor of Bob Woodward and Doris Kearns Goodwin among others. After serving as editor in chief at Atlantic Monthly Press, Godoff joined Random House in 1991.

Her marriage to Malcolm Drummond ended in divorce in 2012 after a long separation. The same year, Godoff married her partner, the writer-photographer Annik LaFarge. Besides LaFarge, her survivors include her brother, Peter Godoff.

Ann Godoff never had the outsized personality of such Random House predecessors as Bennett Cerf and Harold Evans. She was regarded by many as serious, hard-working and committed, known for saying “The book will abide.” But she was competitive, and she didn’t mind making news. She paid a reported $8 million for “Cold Mountain” author Charles Frazier’s next novel, a sum many found excessive at the time, and a comparable amount for a memoir by former Federal Reverse Chairman Alan Greenspan.

Bestselling author Roger Lowenstein, whose seven books have all been published by Godoff, wrote in an email to the AP that she was an exacting but precise editor. He remembered a “blistering memo” from her while shaping the manuscript for “Ways and Means: Lincoln and His Cabinet and the Financing of the Civil War,” a prize-winning history published in 2022. His final draft was 90 pages shorter and he couldn’t think of a “single word” that he regretted being cut.

“She generally reserved her praise, at least in my case, until the end of the process, often in letters that arrived unexpected in the mail,” he wrote. “Nothing was ever sweeter, because one worked so hard to get there, and because you knew that she meant it.”