Walter Minton: Risk-taking book publisher who defied the censors

Walter Minton was a publisher who goaded censors and put out a slew of bestsellers during his 23-year run at the helm of GP Putnam’s Sons, releasing Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, Mario Puzo’s The Godfather and works by authors including Norman Mailer and John le Carré.

Minton, who has died aged 96, was 31 when he became president of Putnam’s in 1955, succeeding his father as head of the company. He had once planned to pursue a legal career and found himself immersed – not altogether unhappily – in a world of legal threats and occasional obscenity trials, while publishing many of his era’s most acclaimed and controversial writers.

Through Putnam’s and its imprints (including Berkley Books and Coward, McCann & Geoghegan), Minton published authors including Simone de Beauvoir, Scott Turow, Philip K Dick, Thomas Harris and Robert A Heinlein, whose science-fiction novel Stranger in a Strange Land (1961) was a personal favourite.

His publishing house was the first to release US editions of novels including William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, in 1955, and Le Carré’s The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, in 1964.

But Minton was perhaps best known for taking a chance on novels that, because of their sexual content, no other publisher would touch. The year he became Putnam’s president, his firm published Mailer’s The Deer Park, which included a passage involving oral sex.

Minton, who had admired Mailer’s 1948 debut, The Naked and the Dead, acquired the novel without making any changes, later telling the author that he had been prepared to take the book without reading it, fully confident that its sales would more than make up for the advance. “He is the only publisher I ever met who would make a good general,” Mailer wrote.

In 1958, Minton took an even bigger gamble in publishing the first US edition of Lolita, Nabokov’s novel about a literature professor’s obsession with a 12-year-old girl. Although it is now considered one of the greatest novels of the 20th century, the book had been spurned by editors – one recommended “that it be buried under a stone for a thousand years” – and faced bans in Europe after being published by Olympia Press, a small Paris-based firm run by Maurice Girodias. “It had a reputation of being very sexy, though it really wasn’t,” Minton said, “and a lot of publishers wouldn’t bring it to you, because it was too ‘dirty’. To me, that was an opportunity.”

Minton cut a deal with Girodias and released the novel to a flurry of negative reviews but no major lawsuits. Nabokov’s agent announced that Lolita was the first book since Gone With the Wind to sell 100,000 copies in its first three weeks.

Over the next few years, Minton presided over American editions of Candy, a 1958 sex satire by Terry Southern and Mason Hoffenberg, and Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, an 18th-century erotic novel by John Cleland. Popularly known as “Fanny Hill”, the latter chronicled a country girl who becomes a London sex worker, and was banned for obscenity in Massachusetts after its release in 1963. The ban was overturned three years later in a landmark Supreme Court decision, Memoirs v Massachusetts.

The legal saga proved gratifying and lucrative for Minton. “We’ve sold 10 times as many copies as we would have if there hadn’t been this censorship proceeding,” he said.

Walter Joseph Minton was born in the Bronx, New York, in 1923. His mother, the former Ida Harris, was once a chorus line dancer; his father, Melville, entered the publishing business at 15. Melville was made president in 1932, and by the time his son was 11 he had already mapped out a career plan for him: six months in the stock and shipping room, followed by a couple years in manufacturing, three or four more in sales, a stint in advertising, several months in accounting and finally a stay in the editorial division.

Walter studied at Williams College in Massachusetts and received a bachelor’s degree from Harvard in 1947. He was due to attend Harvard Law School but his father asked him to work over the summer and he never left.

Minton sold Putnam’s to the entertainment conglomerate MCA in 1975, at a time when independent publishing houses were being swept up by larger companies. He was replaced as president three years later by Peter Israel, an editor and novelist, and finally made his way to law school, graduating from Columbia in 1982 at the age of 58.

He worked for several years at a firm in New Jersey before retiring to Florida. His former company is now part of Penguin Random House.

One of Putnam’s biggest successes under Minton emerged out of a contest he launched in the early 1960s to find “the best unpublished novel in the English language”. Minton offered a six-figure advance, with predictable results, said Israel: “Every fiction manuscript on every dusty shelf in the English-speaking world, ended up in the floor-to-ceiling piles that adorned our corridors and offices.”

The contest ended without a winner. But among the novels signed during the hunt, using “seed money” given out to promising writers, was a pulpy Mafia epic titled The Godfather. Dismissed by some critics as a “trash novel”, it sold more than 20 million copies and inspired Francis Ford Coppola’s Oscar-winning film trilogy.

Minton’s first marriage, to Pauline Ehst, ended in divorce. In 1970, he married Marion Whitehorn. He is survived by Marion and six children.

Walter Minton, publisher, born 13 November 1923, died 19 November 2019

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