Remembering Ann Godoff

The publisher who, in my experience, was always right.

The New York Times has an obituary of Ann Godoff, the publisher who died this week at 76. Though she was publicity-shy, millions of people experienced her work without knowing her.

Her many writers include Ron Chernow. In the 1990’s, she persuaded him to overcome his doubts and write a biography of John D. Rockefeller. It became a bestseller. They went on to publish other books together, one of which was Hamilton.

In addition to Chernow, the Times notes, “her more celebrated authors” included “E.L. Doctorow, Thomas Pynchon, Tom Brokaw, Salman Rushdie, Zadie Smith and Alice Waters.” Many others come to mind.

One of Ann’s less celebrated authors would be me. In buying my first book and all that have followed, she gave me the opportunity to work with a great publisher, and now the opportunity to tell you a little of what a great publisher was like.

When I first encountered Ann in 2009, she was in the last job of her career: publisher of The Penguin Press, an imprint of Penguin Random House. She took an interest in my first proposal, for a book about Karachi, Pakistan.

Gail Ross, my agent, had connected me with several publishers who made bids for the book. I chose Ann even though she said my approach to the book was all wrong. She seemed to have an idea of what it could be. She assigned my project to a talented editor, Laura Stickney, who helped me to shape it. When it was finished, Ann sent a handwritten note saying what she thought of it and that she would prefer from then on to edit me herself.

In publishing that first book, Ann and I had a disagreement. She generously allowed me to prevail. Eventually I concluded that she had been right all along, and resolved that from then on I would just do what she said.

That I ever made such a resolution about any editor would probably astonish every other editor I’ve had in my writing life. But for sixteen years or so, I nearly always just did what she said.

Here is what a great publisher brought to the table.

She had power. She bought my second book, Jacksonland, over breakfast in Manhattan. I told her the idea. She said I should send her a letter to memorialize it and that would be it. I’d have a couple of years to write it. She didn’t ask me for an extended book proposal, as is common. She didn’t consult any committee, ask any boss, order up market research or conduct user testing. She believed in the idea and in me.

I had not expected to sell a book over breakfast, and was so taken aback that I chose to write a proposal anyway to make sure I knew what I was doing. She waited for it. She said that some of the most important work of a book was at the front end: What are you really doing, what is this about?

She was a strategic editor, somehow both gentle and ruthless. I’ve heard that many books are barely edited, but nobody could say that of Ann’s. She gave a book thought and she said what she thought. When she was editing Jacksonland, I sent her a chapter that ended with what I considered to be a lyrical scene, which I had refined for days. She came on the phone and told me the chapter ended 600 words before I had ended it. The entire closing scene went out, every word. It didn’t advance the story.

Jacksonland was a story of Andrew Jackson and the Cherokee chief John Ross, a tragic tale that usually had been told from one perspective or the other. In telling it from both, she said, I must remain evenhanded. The power in the story would come from the reader reaching a judgment, not from me proclaiming that I knew who was right.

Once published, the book was embraced both by the Cherokee Nation and by the Hermitage, Andrew Jackson’s historic site in Tennessee. A week or so ago—more than a decade after publication—I received a handwritten letter from a reader who appreciated the book’s evenhandedness.

She was patient. When I turned in a manuscript, she took at least a year to publish. This has always baffled people—why wait a whole year when you can publish a Substack instantly?—but she wanted the time. After her big-picture editing she would turn me over to a colleague, Casey Denis, for the most rigorous of line edits. Casey would all but re-research the book. Everything must be right. Meanwhile Ann would oversee creation of the perfect cover, prepare the company sales reps to market the book, make sure bookstores heard of it, and brainstorm with Gail Brussel, who would promote it.

Her patience allowed me time to reflect on my writing. When I turned in Imperfect Union, she sent a note saying the story really flew—once it got going, after the first 150 manuscript pages. It was such a nice note that I had to read it a few times before realizing that I should radically shorten the setup.

She thought a lot about a book’s structure and how it conveyed meaning. She got me to revise early chapters of Differ We Must again and again, and if anything is original about that book, it is the structure that emerged.

I had the general shape of it from the first. In fact the structure is what sold her; she bought the idea almost instantly in a phone call. But when I sent her chapters, she felt I wasn’t executing it properly. Nor did the revisions work. This went on for so long that I specifically recall her kicking back chapters that I had labeled “Version 14.”

Whatever was published was many versions beyond that. A few of those opening chapters that I repeatedly rewrote are not even in the book. I chose to take them out.

Shortly after publication I was at dinner in Atlanta when my phone rang. I excused myself, went off into a corner, and Ann told me the book was a New York Times bestseller.

She lived to work. She had health difficulties in recent years, but was very private about them and continued working through them. She was alive to current events, mixing histories and novels with investigative journalism. When one of her books was about to break news, she would compress her one-year publishing process to a few weeks. She labored to the end of her life, almost never visible in the national culture but constantly shaping the culture.

In later years she mostly worked from home, and the last time I was able to see her in person was in the summer of 2024. I took a train to the town where she lived in New York’s Hudson Valley, and she picked me up at the station. We had lunch in the window of a restaurant on a sunny day, and we batted around ideas. We talked about history, and also talked about our times. She foresaw dark days ahead, and said that in that darkness there would be a lot of work for writers to do. She was right about that too.