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W.W. NORTON & COMPANY Carol Houck Smith (1923-2008) Ms. Smith spent all of her sixty-year publishing career at W. W. Norton & Company, the nation’s largest independent, employee-owned book publishing firm. There, she edited works by such prominent writers as Stanley Kunitz, Andrea Barrett, Gerald Stern, Rita Dove, Stephen Dunn, Ellen Bryant Voigt, Maxine Kumin, Rick Bass, Charles Baxter, Ron Carlson, Brady Udall, Pam Houston, Molly Peacock, and many others. In sharing the news of her death with colleagues, Norton president W. Drake McFeely commented, “In her quiet way, Carol had one of the most distinguished careers to be found anywhere in publishing, editing a Pulitzer Prize winner and three National Book Award winners in the last decade or so alone. I had a running joke with Carol that I’d only read one of her books if it had been nominated for a major prize, and of course that meant I read virtually all of her books.” Carol Houck Smith was born to Oscar and Elsa Houck of Buffalo, New York in 1923 (the same year that W. W. Norton & Company was founded). She graduated from Vassar College in 1944 with a degree in English. After a brief stint working at Standard Brands in New York City, she found her way into book publishing, joining Norton in 1948 as a secretary to an editor in the Trade Dept. Decades before women came to dominate the book publishing landscape, Ms. Smith blazed a trail for herself in what was then a distinctly male-dominated profession. By the mid 1960s, Ms. Smith had become an editor in her own right, and she was appointed a vice-president in March of 1980. She was named an Editor-at-Large upon her “retirement” from Norton in July of 1996, but that so-called retirement turned out to be on paper only. She continued reporting to the office every day, with her retirement heralding one of the most distinguished and fruitful periods of her career. Between 1996 and 2008, she edited two National Book Award winners, a Pulitzer Prize winner, and winners of many other awards including the Whiting Award, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, and the Paterson Poetry Prize. Ms. Smith was editor to two Poets Laureate of the United States during their terms: Rita Dove and Stanley Kunitz (during his second term), and to a third Poet Laureate following her tenure, Maxine Kumin. She edited three National Award-winning books: Passing Through: The Later Poems by Mr. Kunitz (1995); Ship Fever and Other Stories by Andrea Barrett (1996); and This Time: New and Selected Poems by Gerald Stern (1998), as well as National Book Award Finalists including Ellen Bryant Voigt (twice a finalist), Joan Silber, and Agha Shahid Ali. She edited the Pulitzer Prize winning-book Different Hours by Stephen Dunn (2001) and Pulitzer Prize finalists including Ms. Voigt, Ms. Barrett, and Mr. Kunitz. At the time of her death, she was editing a major new work of poetry by Ms. Dove, among other books. There are two scholarships endowed in her name, one in poetry and one in fiction: The Carol Houck Smith Scholarship in Poetry at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and the Carol Houck Smith Fiction Fellowship at the University of Wisconsin. In February of 2008, Blackbird organized a Tribute to Carol Houck Smith, Editor Extraordinare, at the AWP conference in New York City, with readings and recollections by poets she published: Beth Ann Fennelly, A. Van Jordan, Mr. Dunn, Mr. Stern, and Ms. Voigt. There, Ms. Smith was celebrated for publishing books with a “distinctive voice, narrative dash, and new ways of viewing the human condition.” The former Carol Houck was married in 1969 to Hunter Smith, who died of lung cancer in 1975. They had no children. She is survived by her niece, Judith Houck Lowen of Cocoa Beach, Florida, and three nephews: Oliver Houck of New Orleans, Louisiana, Philip Houck of Boston, Massachusetts, and David Houck of Novato, California. Gifts in her memory may be made to the Carol Houck Smith scholarships above or to the New York Public Library. In Memoriam | Carol Houck Smith
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