Obituaries: Sherry Arden; George Nicholson; Suzette Haden Elgin

Shelf Awarenerss

Sherry Arden, who "helped invigorate the industry as publicity director, president and publisher of William Morrow & Company" and "whose exuberance as a promoter and perspicacity as a publisher invigorated the book industry with a raft of celebrity tell-all memoirs," died January 27, the New York Times reported. She was 91. Authors she promoted included Peter Bogdanovich, Doris Day, John le Carré, Sophia Loren, Malcolm Muggeridge, Sidney Sheldon, Jacqueline Susann, Shelley Winters and Morris West.

"Sherry was exuberance personified--an early pioneer among women book publishers," author Gail Sheehy recalled.

Ellis Amburn, whom she hired as a senior editor, said Arden "championed my hits, ignored my flops--a rare and precious thing to find in top management. One of her greatest gifts was knowing how to interpret acquisition editors and their creative writers to the conservative bottom-line business types who control the money."

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Literary agent George Nicholson died on February 3. He was 77.
Many people credit Nicholson with inventing paperback publishing for children, when he founded Delacorte Press and Yearling Books and acquired Charlotte's Web and Stuart Little from Harper for $37,500, "which in 1966 was all the money in the world," Nicholson told Leonard S. Marcus for an article in the Horn Book. His first job in 1959 was working for Albert Leventhal, then president of Artists and Writers Guild, a firm partly owned by Western Printing and Lithographing, which published Golden Books, among others. He had been an agent at Sterling Lord Literistic since 1995.
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Science fiction author and poet Suzette Haden Elgin, who was best known for her Gentle Art of Verbal Self-defense books and the Native Tongue trilogy, died January 27. She was 78. Locus magazine noted that Elgin's "interest in linguistics is apparent in her SF, particularly in the Native Tongue books and A First Dictionary & Grammar of Láadan (1985), a work of nonfiction about the language she constructed for the Coyote Jones series. She was widely published as a linguist as well."

In an Amazing Stories magazine tribute, Diane Severson wrote: "I was profoundly affected by her novel Native Tongue, which was read and discussed by the Feminist Science Fiction Fantasy & Utopian Literature ListServ/Bookgroup many years ago, when I was just rediscovering my love for science fiction. When I discovered science fiction poetry and the Science Fiction Poetry Association I was delighted to find it had been founded by this extraordinary writer, linguist and poet."