Sol Stein, a prolific novelist and playwright, savvy publisher and visionary editor who helped fashion a collection of trenchant essays by James Baldwin, a former high school classmate, into a literary classic, “Notes of a Native Son,” died on Thursday at his home in Tarrytown, N.Y. He was 92 .

The cause was complications of dementia, his wife, Dr. Edith Shapiro, said.

A Chicago-born transplant to the Bronx, Mr. Stein had in the 1950s been a fiercely anti-Communist scriptwriter for the Voice of America, Washington’s Cold War propaganda radio network, and a leading defender of civil liberties. But he made his most lasting mark in publishing.

In 1962 he and his wife at the time, Patricia Day, founded the publishing house Stein and Day, which had immediate success that year with the director Elia Kazan’s debut book, the novel “America, America.” The story of a Greek youth who makes his way to the United States, the book sold three million copies, and Mr. Kazan turned it into a movie, released the next year. Mr. Stein was Stein and Day’s editor in chief.

Among the other authors and scholars he worked with were Jacques Barzun and Lionel Trilling, his former professors at Columbia; and David Frost, Budd Schulberg and Dylan Thomas. Stein and Day also published the defense lawyer F. Lee Bailey, the writer Claude Brown, the critic Leslie Fiedler, the socialite and memoirist Barbara Howar and the Soviet Union scholar Bertram Wolfe, among many others.