Harriet Mc Dougal - Career

Career

When Harriet finished college in 1960, she worked for a year as the assistant archivist at the South Carolina Historical Society, making $42.50 a week. There she met a man who gave her a reference letter for John Wiley & Sons, where she began her editing career. After seven years at John Wiley & Sons, she moved to Harcourt Brace where she worked on the first science fiction and fantasy textbook ever published, and then to World Publishing to run the copyeditors for the children's books department. After a brief period of freelancing, she landed a job at Grosset & Dunlap.

By the early 1970s, Harriet McDougal had established herself as Tom Doherty's top editor under the Tempo imprint at Grosset & Dunlap. While at Tempo, McDougal edited several science fiction and fantasy books, and she also edited comic strip collections; among other things, she negotiated Tempo's acquisition of the rights for Hagar the Horrible. Doherty's and McDougal's success with Tempo eventually led to the purchase of Charter Communications and its science fiction imprint Ace Books by Grosset & Dunlap in 1976. When McDougal was Editorial Director for Ace, Doherty hired Jim Baen to work under her, and when Doherty left Ace to start Tor Books in 1980, Baen followed, working at Tor for a few years before starting his own imprint, Baen Books.

McDougal's father died in 1977, just over a year after the death of her mother. Despite a promotion at Ace to Vice President, she decided to resign and return to Charleston to raise her son and assume responsibility for the family home. Through a profit-sharing agreement with Dick Gallen, who had been general counsel for Dell Publishing, she established her own imprint, Popham Press; Gallen was also an early financier of Tor Books, and McDougal also continued to edit for Doherty from Charleston. She met Robert Jordan through a local bookstore, where she learned from the owner that Jordan had sold his first novel, Warriors of the Altaii, to Jim Baen, and that when Baen had left Ace for Tor, Susan Allison had taken over for him at Ace and had reverted the rights for the book to Jordan, leaving him unpublished. McDougal left her contact information for Jordan on an index card.

Jordan contacted McDougal, and she read Warriors of the Altaii. It wasn't what she was interested in, so Jordan pitched a historical fiction series instead, which Jordan originally envisioned as a bodice-ripper. Eventually she edited and published The Fallon Blood, written by Jordan as Reagan O'Neal, for Popham Press in 1980; when they finished touring for the book, they began dating, and soon became engaged. At that time, Jordan published Cheyenne Raiders (as Jackson O'Reilly) through another editor, "because I thought, 'Hang on...I just asked a woman to marry me, and she is my source of income!' So I very hurriedly sold the book somewhere else so she would not be my sole source of income." However, McDougal edited all of his other books, which were published by the Tor imprint. They married on March 28, 1981, and Jordan began writing the Wheel of Time in 1984. After their marriage, Harriet kept McDougal as her professional name, and she continued to edit for Tor, working on projects such as Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game and The Black Company series by Glen Cook.