Sol Stein - Editor and Publisher

Editor and Publisher

In 1953 Stein edited and supervised the publication of McCarthy and the Communists by James Rorty and Moshe Decter for the Beacon Press in Boston. Melvin Arnold, director of the Beacon Press appointed Stein as General Editor of Beacon’s Contemporary Affairs Series in the book size trade paperback format developed by Stein. Working as a freelance contractor, Stein’s first list for Beacon included Three Who Made a Revolution by Bertram Wolfe, Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell, The Century of Total War by Raymond Aron, An End to Innocence by Leslie Fiedler, The Need for Roots by Simone Weil, The Hero in History by Sidney Hook, Social Darwinism in American Thought by Richard Hofstadter, and The Invisible Writing by Arthur Koestler.

Sol Stein edited the classic work Notes of a Native Son by James Baldwin, selected as #19 of the “100 best nonfiction books of the 20th century”; Elia Kazan’s America America; and Lionel Trilling’s Freud and the Crisis of Our Culture. He was also responsible for the continued publication of Bertram D. Wolfe’s The Fabulous Life of Diego Rivera and George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia, selected as #42 of the 100 best nonfiction books of the 20th century.

In 1959 Lionel Trilling, Jacques Barzun, W. H. Auden and Sol Stein launched The Mid-Century Book Society, an upscale book club, which was an immediate success.