Walter Minton Illustration by Tom Bachtell

One recent afternoon, Walter Minton, the ninety-four-year-old former president of G. P. Putnam’s Sons, sat in the study of his house in Saddle River, New Jersey, and reminisced about the controversial novels he championed in his youth and the trials of getting them into print. Minton was dressed in slacks and a cardigan, with a thinning head of white hair; he still wears the trim, boxy beard that he adopted mid-career. He was thirty-one when he took over Putnam’s, in 1955, and the shelves of his living room offer a higgledy-piggledy tour of his route through twentieth-century publishing, from John le Carré to Mario Puzo to Scott Turow.

Of all his writers, Minton said, the most difficult was Norman Mailer. “Mailer was a quite ordinary writer type, until he got angry,” he said. “Then he was a different kettle of fish.” Minton had admired Mailer’s début novel, “The Naked and the Dead,” and when he heard that the novelist had a manuscript, “The Deer Park,” that no publisher would touch because of a passage involving oral sex, he pursued it. Bennett Cerf, a co-founder of Random House, phoned to dissuade him: “Cerf said, ‘Walter, I know you’re young, but if you publish this book, you’ll bring down the great veil of censorship.’ ” Minton laughed. “We published it and ran ads: ‘The Book Six Publishers Refused to Bring You!’ ”

Mailer and Minton, Second World War veterans a year apart in age, shared a pugnacious streak. “Check this out,” Minton said, pulling down a copy of “The Deer Park,” inscribed by its author. “To Ernest Hemingway,” it read. “I am deeply curious to know what you think of this—but if you do not answer, or if you answer with the kind of crap you use to answer unprofessional writers, sycophants, brown-noses, etc, then fuck you, and I will never attempt to communicate with you again.” He shook his head. “Mailer asked me to get this to Hemingway. I told him I mailed it to Cuba and it came back ‘Addressee Unknown.’ ” Mailer, who referred to Minton as “very bold,” once called him “the only publisher I ever met who would make a good general.”

Emboldened by “The Deer Park,” Minton followed with a bigger coup: “Lolita.” A long list of American publishers too timid to issue the book had forced Vladimir Nabokov, at the time a little-known émigré writer, to turn to Maurice Girodias, whose Paris-based Olympia Press churned out erotic potboilers. Minton got hold of an excerpt of the novel, via the unlikely agency of an exotic dancer named Rosemary Ridgewell, in whose living room he once fell asleep after a night on the town. “I woke in the middle of the night and there was this story on the table. I started reading. By morning, I knew I had to publish it.”

Visits to Paris ensued, to deal with the mercurial Girodias, as did a flight to Cornell during a storm to woo Nabokov. Minton saw the novel as a marketer’s dream. “It had a reputation of being very sexy, though it really wasn’t, and a lot of publishers who wouldn’t bring it to you, because it was too ‘dirty.’ To me, that was an opportunity!” Sure enough, when Putnam’s released “Lolita,” in August of 1958, Orville Prescott, in the Times, called it “repulsive . . . highbrow pornography”—and the novel zoomed to the top of best-seller lists.

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After “Lolita,” Minton poached Girodias’s list for Terry Southern and Mason Hoffenberg’s bawdy comedy “Candy” and also published “Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure,” better known as “Fanny Hill,” John Cleland’s 1749 chronicle of erotic adventure. When Putnam’s published “Fanny Hill,” in 1963, New York City officials suppressed the book for obscenity (the publisher was eventually vindicated by the Supreme Court). Mailer, in a letter, affectionately addressed Minton as a “litigious prick.”

“I honestly didn’t see anything wrong with those books,” Minton said. “None of them!”

In 1975, Putnam’s was acquired by MCA, and Minton was forced out—whereupon, at fifty-five, he became a law student at Columbia. He talked about what killed the publishing industry he had known: the rise of agents, the influence of Hollywood. “Traditionally, publishers and editors talked to their authors,” he said. “When the agents came along, that became much rarer. Now you went to lunch with them.”

Nabokov referred to Minton’s house, a 1960 Colonial with tall white columns, as “the house ‘Lolita’ built.” Minton looked out his study window and watched a family of four deer that had made its way into the back yard. “See that buck? He sends the does out first. He won’t stick his neck out.” He paused. “You can learn a lot from watching those deer.” ♦