Jerome Lindon; Led Pioneering Publishing House in France

Jerome Lindon, longtime head of the French publishing house that brought playwright Samuel Beckett to prominence after printing “Waiting for Godot,” has died. He was 75.

Lindon, suffering from cancer, died Monday at his Paris home and was buried Thursday at Montparnasse Cemetery.

He joined the Editions de Minuit as an intern in 1946 and took over the struggling publishing house two years later, at the age of 23. The daily Liberation described him as the most influential 20th century editor in the French publishing industry.

Born in Paris on June 9, 1925, Lindon joined the Editions de Minuit by chance after working in the French resistance against German occupiers during World War II. The firm, founded in 1942 by two other resistance members, was given its name because it published clandestinely after midnight (minuit).

Pumping family money into the struggling company, Lindon moved it into a former Left Bank brothel in St.-Germain-des-Pres and took a series of literary risks that propelled the careers of Beckett and Claude Simon--both to become Nobel Prize winners--and “new French novel” authors such as Nathalie Sarraute, who opened literary horizons with her 1957 book “Tropismes.”

Editions de Minuit took off in 1951 when it turned out Beckett’s “Molloy,” a novel that other publishers had rejected. Lindon described his first encounter with Beckett’s work as “one of the great moments of my life.”

“I knew immediately he was one of the greatest writers of our time,” Lindon recalled in an interview after the 1989 death of the writer. Over the years, Lindon published nearly two dozen works by Beckett, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1969.

Besides the two Nobels, Lindon gained two Goncourt prizes, France’s most prestigious literary award, for his publishing house.

French President Jacques Chirac called Lindon “one of the great, professional, intellectual and moral figures” of French publishing.