Trustee Emeritus John T. Sargent Sr. (1924–2012) died peacefully at home in Manhattan on February 5, 2012. A powerful figure in New York publishing, he was long associated with and ultimately CEO and chairman of Doubleday & Company. Sargent was also life trustee of the New York Public Library and a long-time trustee of the New York Zoological Society. He became a Trustee of the American Academy in Rome 1980, President of the Academy in 1988, and Trustee Emeritus in 2001.
Academy President Adele Chatfield-Taylor remembered Sargent as “courtly, intelligent, and well read. He was great company and made countless contributions to the Academy. He loved artists and scholars and went to Rome often to follow their work. We will never see anyone like him. He belonged to another time.”
Together with Nelson Doubleday, Sargent led Doubleday's expansion as a self-styled “communications conglomerate” that included book manufacturing, the Literary Guild and Doubleday book clubs, and the acquisition of book exporter Feffer & Simons, a chain of Doubleday book shops, as well as radio and television stations and a baseball team (the New York Mets).
During its heyday, the company issued about seven hundred titles per year, ran twenty-six bookshops across America, and mailed books to millions of readers through its Literary Guild and Doubleday book clubs. Among its best selling titles were Jaws by Peter Benchley and Roots by Alex Haley. In addition the company published books by celebrated authors, Stephen King, Thor Heyerdahl, Irwin Shaw, Jean Shepherd, Irving Stone, Gay Talese, and Kurt Vonnegut.
In 1978 Sargent famously recruited his longtime friend Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis to join the firm as an editor. By 1985 he retired as chairman of Doubleday, and in 1986 the company was sold to German publisher Bertelsmann AG.
Sargent’s survivors include a son, John Jr., a daughter, Ellen; six grandchildren; his wife, the former Betty Nichols Kelly, whom he married in 1985; and two stepchildren, Elizabeth Lee Kelly and James Hamilton Kelly.
There will be a private service in Boston on Friday and a memorial celebration honoring Sargent's life in March in New York. Those wishing to contribute to the Academy in Sargent’s memory should donate to the John T. Sargent Writer in Residence fund, which he started many years ago to support all kinds of writers at the Academy.