John Geoghegan
American publisher

John Geoghegan (1917 – December 28, 1999) was an American publisher.
Early life
Geoghegan was born in Philadelphia.
Career
Geoghegan started his career as a book salesman, a job he did for 14 years.
He served in the United States Army Air Corps from 1942 to 1945.
In 1959, Geoghegan joined the publishers Coward-McCann in 1959 as editor-in-chief, and in 1961, became president, and then chairman. The company later became Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, and he was chairman until his resignation in 1981, over the corporate business school mentality that was coming to dominate publishing. Afterwards, he was an editor-at-large at William Morrow and Company from 1981 to 1982.
He and the literary scout Lena Wickman are credited with "discovering" John le Carré and his debut novel The Spy Who Came In From The Cold.
Personal life
Geoghegan died on December 28, 1999, in a hospital in Walnut Creek, California, of complications from a brain aneurysm.
“John Geoghegan” enters the record as american publisher. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what John, Geoghegan and American can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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This entry incorporates text from “John Geoghegan” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.