Starling Lawrence, Editor Who Uncovered Best Sellers, Dies at 82
Starling Lawrence, a courtly pencil-wielding editor whose keen eye for riveting narratives transformed Michael Lewis, Patrick O’Brian, Sebastian Junger and many others into best-selling authors, died on Thursday in Manhattan. He was 82.
His daughter, Dune Lawrence, said he died in a hospital from complications of a head injury he suffered in a fall in April.
For more than five decades at W.W. Norton & Company, Mr. Lawrence waded into the so-called slush pile of unsolicited manuscripts to discover unsung authors and to help fashion sometimes amorphous antecedents into sizzling, culturally significant potboilers.
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