This article is more than 8 months old

This article is more than 8 months old

Sonny Mehta, the head of Alfred A Knopf who led one of the book world’s most esteemed imprints to new heights, has died. He was 77.

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Mehta, who was married to the author Gita Mehta, died on Monday at a hospital in Manhattan. According to Knopf, the cause was complications from pneumonia.

“Mehta’s contributions to the world of letters and publishing are without precedent,” a statement from the publisher read. “His exacting standards – in editorial, production, design, marketing, and publicity – were a beacon to the book industry and beyond.”

Mehta oversaw a blend of prize-winning literature by authors including Toni Morrison and Cormac McCarthy and blockbusters including Fifty Shades of Grey and The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.

Bearded and chain-smoking, he spoke carefully and chose wisely, helping Knopf thrive even as the industry faced the jarring changes of corporate consolidation, the demise of thousands of independent stores and the rise of e-books.

An accomplished publisher and editor since his mid-20s, he succeeded the revered Robert Gottlieb in 1987 as just the third Knopf editor-in-chief in its 72-year history. He fashioned his own record of critical and commercial success, continuing to publish celebrated authors signed by Gottlieb, including Morrison and Robert Caro, and adding talent such as Tommy Orange, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Karen Russell.

Knopf also was home to some of the best-selling works in recent times. In 2008, Mehta acquired US rights to the Millennium series, a trilogy of crime fiction by a dead Swedish journalist, Stieg Larsson. It sold tens of millions of copies. In 2012, the paperback imprint Vintage won a bidding war for an explicit erotic trilogy that at the time could only be read digitally, the Fifty Shades novels by EL James.

Other top sellers released under Mehta included Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In, Bill Clinton’s memoir My Life and Cheryl Strayed’s Wild.

When the Center for Fiction honoured Mehta in 2018, tributes were written by Joan Didion, Haruki Murakami and Anne Tyler, who called him the “Fred Astaire of editing”.

Knopf’s catalog often reflected Mehta’s own broad curiosity. In a single season, the publisher might release new fiction by Morrison and Gabriel García Márquez, crime novels by PD James and James Ellroy, poetry by Anne Carson and Philip Levine, history by John Keegan and Joseph Ellis, humour by Nora Ephron and memoirs by Katharine Hepburn and Andre Agassi.

Mehta allowed Caro to spend years between each instalment of his Lyndon Johnson biographies, a decades-long project that sold hundreds of thousands and brought numerous awards.

Mehta was born Ajai Singh Mehta, the son of Indian diplomat Amrik Singh Mehta. He graduated from Cambridge with degrees in history and English literature and needed little time to make an impact in London, helping launch the career of college friend Germaine Greer and introducing British readers to the profane Americana of Hunter S Thompson.

With Pan Books, he released works by rising authors such as Ian McEwan and Salman Rushdie while signing up Jackie Collins, Douglas Adams and other bestsellers. He was Gottlieb’s choice to take over at Knopf, but still faced initial wariness from the staff.

“People … had the terrible fear that I was going to suddenly publish Jackie Collins over here and really sort of lower the tone of the place,“ Mehta told Publishers Weekly in 2015.

“I think the difference was that I probably encouraged people to market a lot more than they were in the habit of doing. I encouraged them to look at a certain type of literary fiction and see it wasn’t necessarily intended for some kind of ghetto, that there was a bigger market for it.”

Mehta survived numerous transformations at Knopf, notably the 1999 acquisition by the German conglomerate Bertelsmann AG and the 2012 merger with Penguin.

“On a good day, I am still convinced I have the best job in the world,” he told Vanity Fair in 2016, explaining that he had recently finished a novella by Graham Swift.

“I opened it and didn’t know what to expect, and I read it in one sitting right here in the office, utterly mesmerised. Sometimes you find something new and you just say ‘Wow’.”