Erwin Glikes; Publisher of Social Criticism

Erwin A. Glikes, an admired, sometimes controversial publisher of social criticism, has died at the age of 56.

Glikes died Friday of a heart attack en route from Manhattan to his weekend home in Upstate New York.

He had recently joined Penguin U.S.A., where he was to have headed a new nonfiction division, True North Publishing.

But he made his major mark over the past generation as president and publisher of Basic Books in the 1970s, then head of trade publishing at Simon & Schuster, and for the past decade as president and publisher of The Free Press.

If any conservative in the United States ever fit the definition “a liberal who has been mugged,” it might have been the redoubtable, intellectually independent Glikes.

Born in Antwerp, Belgium, the son of Jewish refugees from Hitler, he began adult life as a literary critic and professor of English at Columbia University. In 1968, when he was an assistant dean at Columbia, the campus exploded in sometimes violent protests. Those events were the beginning of second thoughts for many liberals on that campus and elsewhere.

One was University of Chicago philosopher Alan Bloom, whose book “The Closing of the American Mind” had, for a book of its seriousness, an unprecedented run on the bestseller list. Glikes, who took his own second thoughts into a publishing career that began the year after the Columbia protests, was Bloom’s publisher.

Among other intellectually distinguished critiques of American society from a center-right position, two that Glikes published at The Free Press became winners of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in the Current Interest category: in 1991 Francis Fukuyama’s “The End of History and the Last Man” and last year Peter Skerry’s “Mexican Americans: The Ambivalent Minority.”

The fame of such higher-profile conservatives on Glikes’ authors’ list as George Will and Robert Bork made them easy to sell, but Glikes, who persuaded the large corporations he worked for to give him close control over sales and publicity, was most admired for his ability to find commercial success with unknown, intellectually demanding writers.

Crime expert James Q. Wilson of UCLA, whom Glikes persuaded to collect the articles that became Wilson’s influential “Thinking About Crime,” said Monday:

“Erwin understood my book in some ways better than I did myself. He explained to me how and where other people might respond to what I had been thinking and writing. The book that resulted reached a far wider audience than I would ever have thought possible.”

Valued by his authors as a conversation partner, Glikes was liked by his professional colleagues for his unfailing generosity and courtesy. In extemporaneous remarks at the close of a panel discussion on publishing in March, Glikes touched many with searching comments on the latter-day rise in book publishing of a “culture of nastiness” in which rudeness “far from being recognized as a vice is taken as a proof of brilliance.”

He is survived by his wife, Carol Janeway, a vice president at Alfred A. Knopf, and two children, Lela and Michael.