Stephen Rubin

Stephen Rubin died Friday October 13 2023. Rubin earned a bachelor’s degree from New York University and a master’s in journalism from Boston University. Rubin was a 43-year-old freelance journalist and out-of-work magazine editor when he took his first job in publishing, at Bantam Books. Nine months after he was hired, Mr. Rubin became Bantam’s editor in chief. Just a few years after that, in 1990, he took over Doubleday, which, like Bantam, was owned by the German conglomerate Bertelsmann. Stephen Edward Rubin was born on Nov. 10, 1941, in the Bronx. In the early 2000s, Mr. Rubin — now running Doubleday Broadway, a restructured firm under the corporate umbrella of Random House — appraised the work of an unproven novelist, Dan Brown. Brown’s “The Da Vinci Code,” a suspenseful tale of centuries-old cults and secret Christian mythology that became one of the most popular books of the modern era. It sold more than 80 million copies and inspired a movie that grossed about $760 million worldwide. In 2009, Rubin became president and publisher of Henry Holt, a smaller firm without Doubleday’s pedigree. In 2018, at 76 years old, Mr. Rubin was set to hit it big one more time. Less than two months after Holt published it, Michael Wolff’s “Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House” had sold more than 900,000 copies,