Paris - Jerome Lindon, French publisher of Samuel Beckett and his literary executor, died yesterday in Paris, writes Terence Killeen.
Lindon was head of a small avant-garde publishing firm when he first read Beckett's novel Molloy in 1948 and immediately decided to publish it. Soon after, he published Waiting for Godot. Beckett feared the decision to publish him would ruin Lindon but in fact Lindon's firm, Les Editions de Minuit, went on to become one of France's leading publishers of literary and philosophical works.
However, it remained a relatively small-scale operation, publishing just some 20 carefully chosen titles a year. The firm was always at the cutting edge of philosophy as well as literature, publishing such thinkers as Jacques Derrida and Gilles Deleuze. It was also politically involved, being one of the first to expose French abuses of human rights in Algeria.
Lindon published all Beckett's works in French; he was not merely his publisher, being also one of Beckett's closest and most trusted friends. Among the other authors he published were Claude Simon, like Beckett a Nobel Prize-winner, and Alain Robbe-Grillet. One of his biggest publishing successes was Marguerite Duras's The Lover. Lindon, who died of cancer, was aged 75.
Last night President Jacques Chirac, with "particular emotion", paid tribute to this "passionate discoverer" of new talent, calling him one of the greatest figures of French publishing. The Prime Minister, Mr Lionel Jospin, mentioned Lindon's role in the Resistance and said he was always ready to take physical and intellectual risks.