US book publisher Andre Schiffrin dies at 78

French-born US publisher Andre Schiffrin, who introduced a raft of literary lions to American readers, has died in Paris at the age of 78, the New York publishing house he founded said today.
Schiffrin, who divided his time between New York and his native Paris, had been suffering from pancreatic cancer.
"The New Press mourns the loss of its visionary founder... a brilliant editor, publisher, progressive thinker and mentor," the company said in a statement on its website.
The New York Times called Schiffrin "one of America's most influential men of letters," not least for his opposition to the takeover of book publishing in the United States by big media conglomerates.

For 28 years, Schiffrin ran Pantheon Books, a Random House imprint that published such writers as Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Gunter Grass, R D Laing, Studs Terkel and Noam Chomsky.
With Pantheon losing money, Random House -- then part of the Newhouse media empire -- fired Schiffrin, prompting an outcry among authors and leading Schiffrin to launch the New Press in 1992.

Random House was sold in 1998 to the German media giant Bertelsmann, while Schiffrin wrote a critique of the book industry, titled "The Business of Books: How the International Conglomerates Took Over Publishing and Changed the Way We Read."

Schiffrin came to the United States as a youngster when his family fled France during World War II to escape the Nazi-led persecution of Jews.
His father Jacques Schiffrin, who was born in Baku, then part of the Russian empire, had founded the well-known La Pleiade imprint in France.
Schiffrin is survived by two daughters, one of whom is married to the American economist and Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz.