Simon Michael Bessie, who in 1959 left a top editorial position at what was then called Harper & Brothers to help found Atheneum Publishers, perhaps the last major literary house to be started from scratch in the 20th century, died on Monday at his home in Lyme, Conn. He was 92.
Blackstone-Shelbourne
S. M. Bessie, around 1971.
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For all his success in shepherding major books into print, Mr. Bessie also let some get away. Two decisions he later regretted were his rejections of Frantz Fanon’s “Wretched of the Earth” and Vladimir Nabokov’s “Lolita.”
“One reads under different circumstances,” he said in an interview with the online journal Archipelago in 1997. “I have now reread Lolita several times since then, and I cannot reconstruct the S. M. Bessie who sat there in a hotel in Paris and turned that book down! But I did.”
