Draft:Edward L. Burlingame (publisher)

Edward L. Burlingame, a book publisher and editor, worked with many notable authors of the second half of the 20th century.

EARLY LIFE
Burlingame was born in New York City on January 21, 1935. He grew up in Connecticut and attended Phillips Exeter Academy and Harvard College, from which he graduated in 1957 with a AB degree in English Literature. He later, in 1982, graduated from the Advanced Management Program at the Harvard Business School.

BOOK PUBLISHING CAREER
After two years of active duty aboard a destroyer in the US Navy, he found his first book publishing job in 1959 in the editorial department of the London publisher, MacGibbon & Kee Ltd.

In 1961, he returned to the United States and went to work for New American Library as an Associate Editor. At NAL he would become a Senior Editor and among the books he acquired and edited was Charles Webb's first novel, The Graduate, on which the film was based.

From 1965 to 1968, he was Vice President and Editor-in-Chief of Walker & Company. He brought Isaac Asimov to Walker, where Asimov would publish many books in future years. He also published work by Brian O’Nolan (Flann O’Brien), including the republication of his classic At Swim-Two-Birds. O’Brien is now considered a major figure in twentieth-century Irish literature. He commissioned Leon Friedman to prepare The Civil Rights Reader: Basic Documents of the Civil Rights Movement, published in 1967.

In 1969, he joined J.B. Lippincott & Co., where he became Editor-in-Chief of the Adult Trade Division, Senior Vice President of the Company and a member of its Board of Directors.

In 1972, after reading news accounts of the rescue of sixteen young Uruguayan rugby players after their plane crashed in the Andes, he flew to Montevideo and arranged to meet with the survivors and their families. In an intense international competition, he successfully negotiated a contract with the survivors for their story and commissioned Piers Paul Read to write it. The result was Alive: The Story of the Andes Survivors, a world-wide bestseller that reached #1 in the US. It was translated into 19 languages. The paperback rights were sold by Lippincott to Avon for the highest price ever paid up to that time for the reprint rights of a new book. Alive remains one of the great classics of human survival.

While at Lippincott, among the other authors he published were Edward Abbey, Leon Edel, Lev Kopelev, John D. MacDonald, Margaret Mead and James Baldwin (together, authors of A Rap on Race), and Leon Panetta.

In 1977, Harper & Row acquired Lippincott and, in 1979, combined the Trade Division of Lippincott with their own. Burlingame was appointed to lead the new entity as Publisher and Editor-in-Chief. Among the authors he published at Harper were Russell Banks, Saul Bellow, Annie Dillard, Allen Ginsberg, Alasdair Gray, Vasily Grossman, Arthur Miller, Sue Miller, Roxana Robinson, and Geoffrey Ward.

In 1988, after the acquisition of Harper & Row by Rupert Murdoch’s NewsCorp, Burlingame initiated a new Harper imprint, Edward Burlingame Books, which he ran until the end of 1992. The year before, in 1991, The New York Times Book Review, in its annual round-up “Notable Books of the Year” had selected six of his imprint's books. No personal editorial imprint in the industry attained a higher number. In his imprint, he worked with Amy Bloom, Veronica Geng, Jonathan Raban, James Reston Jr., and Colin Thubron, among other writers.

In 1994, together with a group of investors, he founded The Adventure Library, a book club offering its members fine editions of the great books of high adventure—the classics of exploration, discovery and survival. Thirty books were published in the series, which concluded in 2003.

AFFILIATIONS
From 1983 to 1986, he served on the Executive Council of the General Publishing Division of the Association of American Publishers, was elected its Vice Chairman in 1984 and Chairman in 1985. He has also served as: Treasurer and a member of the Executive Board of the American P.E.N. Center; a member of the Eastern Regional Panel of the President's Commission on White House Fellowships; a member of the Book Committee of the Sloan Foundation; and a member of the Visiting Committee of the New School for Social Research in New York.

PERSONAL LIFE
An avid squash player, Burlingame competed at the national level and won five national championships. In 2018, he reached the finals of the World Championship in his age group.

He is a widower with three children.

He lives in North Salem, NY.

He is the great, great grandson of the diplomat and abolitionist Anson Burlingame (1820 –1870). He is the great grandson of the American writer and editor, Edward L. Burlingame (1848-1922). He is also the great nephew of the American writer and historian Roger Burlingame (1889–1967).