Jason Wolkow Epstein (August 25, 1928 – February 4, 2022) was an American editor and publisher. He was the editorial director of Random House from 1976 to 1995. He also co-founded The New York Review of Books in 1963. Early life Epstein was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on August 25, 1928. His father, Robert, worked as a partner in the family textile business; his mother, Gladys (Shapiro), was a housewife. His family was Jewish. An only child, he attended public schools in Milton, Massachusetts, completing high school at age 15. He studied English literature at Columbia College, where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. He graduated with a bachelor's degree in 1949, before obtaining a Master of Arts the following year. Career After graduating, Epstein joined Doubleday and Company as an editorial trainee, earning $45 a week. While working there, he saw the need for inexpensive, well-made paperbacks of the kinds of books that his classmates, many of them veterans studying on the GI Bill, were reading but could not afford to own in their hardcover editions. With the support of Ken McCormick, Doubleday's chief editor, he launched Anchor Books in 1953. This was the first so-called Quality Paperbacks, which quickly became the dominant paperback format. In 1954 Anchor Books won the Carey–Thomas Award. Epstein left Doubleday in 1958, frustrated at the company's refusal to publish Vladimir Nabokov's controversial novel, Lolita. He joined Random House publishers, and eventually became editorial director in 1976, serving in that capacity until 1995. At Random House, he edited such writers as Jane Jacobs, Norman Mailer, Philip Roth, Gore Vidal, Vladimir Nabokov, E. L. Doctorow, Michael Korda, Benzion Netanyahu, Peter Matthiessen, and Paul Kennedy. He also worked with Ted Geisel, better known as Dr Seuss, who arrived with storyboards to recite "Green Eggs and Ham". He acquired a reputation of being rude and ridiculing other editors' suggestions. He admitted that he was a "disagreeable presence" as he had little patience with other people. Nevertheless, he continued to edit the company's most valuable authors after being relieved of his post as editorial director in 1984. During the New York newspaper strike of 1963, Epstein, his wife Barbara, and their friends Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Hardwick created The New York Review of Books. As he was working for Random House, he couldn't be an editor for this as well. So they turned to their friend Robert