Elizabeth Maguire, 47, Was Publisher Of Basic Books and Novelist
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Elizabeth Maguire, a publisher of noted wit and passion who in a 25-year career worked with historians, theologians, and other nonfiction authors, died Saturday of ovarian cancer. She was 47, and had served as publisher of Basic Books since 2002.
Maguire’s many writers included historian Richard Brookhiser, theologian George Weigel, Harvard University’s Henry Louis Gates, and cultural critic Michael Eric Dyson, who in a statement praised her as a “world-class thinker and my mind’s most faithful companion.
“She nurtured in me and so many other writers a hunger for conceptual rigor, literary beauty and moral clarity,” Mr. Dyson, author of “Holler If You Hear Me,” said.
Born in New York City, Maguire majored in English at Harvard University, graduating magna cum laude in 1980. For six years, she was executive editor of Oxford University Press, where she edited Joan Hedrick’s Pulitzer Prizewinning “Harriet Beecher Stowe.” Maguire also worked at Cambridge University Press,Addison Wesley Longman, and the Free Press before joining Basic Books, in 2000.
Maguire wrote the novel “Thinner, Blonder, Whiter,” published by Carroll & Graf in 2002, and had recently been working on a novel about the 19th-century author Constance Fenimore Woolson.
