March 29, 2024

Anita Miller, Who Battled John Cheever’s Family, Dies at 91

In addition to her son Bruce Joshua Miller, a publisher’s sales representative, Ms. Miller is survived by her husband; two other sons, Mark Crispin Miller, a journalist, author and professor, and Eric Lincoln Miller, a book packager and former publisher; a brother, Joseph Wolfberg; and four grandchildren.

Jordan Miller had started a poetry magazine and was running a news clipping service when the couple became accidental publishers. She had earned a doctorate at Northwestern and was seeking to publish her dissertation on the English novelist Arnold Bennett when they mulled becoming publishers themselves.

Among the manuscripts they considered was “A Guide to Non-Sexist Children’s Books.” They published it as an experiment. Reviews and sales were so successful that they established what became Academy Chicago Publishers.

Among the other books they published were “The Fair Women: The Story of the Woman’s Building, World’s Columbian Exposition, Chicago 1893” (1981); “Sharon” (2005), by the Millers, the first full biography in English of the Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon; “The Complete Transcripts of the Clarence Thomas-Anita Hill Hearings” (2005); “What Went Wrong in Ohio” (2005), about election irregularities; “Hiding in Plain Sight: Eluding the Nazis in Occupied France” (2012); and “County: Life, Death and Politics at Chicago’s Public Hospital” (2013).

Dr. Miller wrote or edited more than 75 books and, like her husband, worked with Chicago Review Press for two years after Academy Chicago was acquired. She received the Pandora Award from the British-based organization Women in Publishing in 1996.

She once described her unforeseen profession as an “addiction.”

“I was born with it,” she told The Chicago Tribune in 2014. “When I brushed my teeth, I had a book propped up on the sink.”

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/09/obituaries/anita-miller-author-and-eclectic-publisher-dies-at-91.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

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