Robert Loomis, editor of Angelou, Styron, dies at 93

NEW YORK (AP) - Robert Loomis, a blue-chip editor of old-fashioned sense and persistence who in more than 50 years at Random House encouraged, prodded and befriended William Styron, Maya Angelou, Calvin Trillin and many others, has died.

Random House announced that Loomis, who retired in 2011, died Sunday at age 93. The publisher did not immediately announce a cause of death.

'œI was just one of many who adored and learned from Bob, who inspired several generations of editors and publishers,'ť Random House President and Publisher Gina Centrello said in a statement. 'œHis values and work ethic are permanently embedded in the Random House DNA.'ť

Loomis was a final link to the so-called 'œGolden Age" of publishing after World War II. He joined Random House in 1957, when co-founders Bennett Cerf and Donald Klopfer were running the company. He remained there into his 80s, long after most of his peers had died or changed jobs, long after the publisher had been bought by the German media conglomerate Bertelsmann AG and the industry overall had shed much of its genteel past.

He was dignified, loyal and successful. Among the award winners and bestsellers, fiction and nonfiction, that he helped publish: Styron's 'œSophie's Choice,'ť Angelou's 'œI Know Why the Caged Bird Sings,'ť Jonathan Harr's 'œA Civil Action'ť and Neil Sheehan's 'œA Bright Shining Lie.'ť

He spoke softly, but acted forcefully, likening a manuscript to a sculpture that required the most precise shaping. 'œPassages'ť author Gail Sheehy wrote of his 'œbarely audible critiques emitted from beneath his white pencil mustache.'ť Angelou would remember his determination to get her to write a memoir, 'œCaged Bird,'ť and how he scrutinized every word and punctuation mark. Loomis spent more than a year working with historian John Toland on revisions for 'œThe Rising Sun,'ť a Pulitzer Prize winner. Styron, best man at both of Loomis' weddings, would speak of his intolerance for bad writing, and his 'œalmost'ť style of editing that would label a manuscript 'œalmost'ť ready for publication.

'œWith Bob,'ť Styron once said, 'œyou can't get by with those moments of laziness or failure of clarity or self-flattering turgidity: he pounces like a cobra, shakes the wretched phrase or sentence into good sense or meaning.'ť

In the 2011 memoir 'œReading My Father,'ť Alexandra Styron described Loomis and her father as a literary odd couple, the author 'œall untidy appetite and noisy id,'ť the editor a 'œsort of Leslie Howard figure, fair hair always meticulously groomed, his voice as gentle as his demeanor.'ť Literary agent Sterling Lord remembered a more adventurous side to Loomis, who for lunch would fly clients in his private plane from Manhattan to Pennsylvania. Seymour M. Hersh, the prize-winning author and journalist, would describe Loomis as 'œprecise, careful and very direct,'ť and certain to order a 'œJack Daniel's on the rocks'ť while only eating 'œhalf of his lunch.'ť

Loomis was married twice, most recently to Hilary Mills. He had two children, one with each wife.

Loomis grew up in Plain City, Ohio, and attended Duke University, where he would meet such future authors as Styron, Peter Maas and Mac Hyman. After writing at an ad agency, Appleton-Century, and editing at Holt, Rinehart & Winston, he joined Random House, which thought enough of the new hire to pay for a one-bedroom apartment in Greenwich Village that had an asking price of $8,000.

'œDonald (Klopfer) said, '~We hear you want to buy this apartment.' And I said, '~Yeah, well, $8,000. I don't have any money at all,'ť Loomis recalled in Al Silverman's 'œThe Time of Their Lives,'ť a publishing history released in 2008. 'œDonald pulled out a checkbook and wrote on it '~eight thousand dollars.''ť

He would publish literary fiction by Styron and Pete Dexter, history by Sheehan, Shelby Foote and Daniel Boorstin, and confessional works by Trillin and Angelou. Along with his many triumphs, Loomis was also responsible, at least in part, for Edmund Morris' 'œDutch.'ť It was an authorized biography of Ronald Reagan that came out in 1999 and became a scandal when Morris - winner of the Pulitzer Prize for the Loomis-edited 'œThe Rise of Theodore Roosevelt'ť - admitted that he didn't understand his subject and inserted himself as a fictional character.

Critics, historians and Reagan supporters denounced the book and Loomis, who acknowledged that he was initially horrified by Morris' experiment, was forced to defend permitting it.

'œI really began to believe in it after a while,'ť Loomis told The New York Times in 1999. 'œAs the material came in, and we started to talk, this was a book that really went through a metamorphosis. This needed a different creative structure to it and different ways of telling Ronald Reagan's story using this viewpoint.'ť