George Braziller (1) (1916–2017)

George Braziller was born in Brooklyn, New York on February 12, 1916. He dropped out of high school after the 10th grade to work as a shipping clerk. He founded a small, independent publishing house that introduced Americans to groundbreaking novelists, poets and new voices from abroad including show more Jean-Paul Sartre and Orhan Pamuk. In the early 1940s, he founded the Book Find Club, buying unsold books cheaply and selling them to subscribers. Under his wife's supervision, the club grew during his World War II Army service in Europe. He also founded the Seven Arts Book Society. Both were sold in the late 1960s to Time Inc. In 1967, he won the Carey-Thomas Award for distinguished creative publishing for his full-color facsimile edition of The Hours of Catherine of Cleves. In 1980, he once again won the Carey-Thomas Award, which cited his "exceptional publishing program, embracing art books and innovative fiction from the United States and abroad." He retired in 2011. His memoir, Encounters: My Life in Publishing, was published in 2015. He died on March 16, 2017 at the age of 101. (Bowker Author Biography) show less