So many years later, I no longer have much memory of other people who worked at New American Library [NAL] during the mid-1970s. The person at NAL who seemed to then have the most influence, from an editorial decision-making point of view, in determining which submitted manuscripts were to be finally accepted for publication, was a culturally-straight-looking and dressed white upper-middle-class white woman in her late 20s or early 30s.
This top NAL editorial decision-maker received a copy of each puublicity release, that was written by the NAL publicity director, Marge, and typed up by me, about every paperback book that was being publicized by NAL; at the same time copies of the press release were put into envelopes and mailed out to various corporate media newspaper, magazine or radio-television book reviewers.
Most men then would likely not have considered the NAL editorial decision-maker as physically attractive as Marge still was in the mid-1970s, despite the chief NAL editor being younger. But with her smiling, easy-going, good-natured personality within the office--which seemed to reflect the fact that she now felt happy with the kind of work she was being paid a good salary to do within the world of publishing--most men in the mid-1970s would still not have considered NAL's then-most influential editorial department decision-maker unattractive.
Politically, the NAL's top editorial decision-maker seemed to be, like Marge, just an anti-racist and anti-war, culturally-straight liberal in the mid-1970s; who had not been involved enough in the late 1960s or early 1970s hip youth counter-culture to have developed a more politically radicalized, anti-imperialist and pro-Black Panther Party antii-racist political consciousness, like I had.
But, given some of the early 1970s women's liberation movement-related and feminist paperback books that NAL had started to market (after the white middle-class's feminist movement began to receive much more favorable corporate mass media coverage, following the well-attended Women's Liberation march in Manhattan in the summer of 1970, and the idea of "women's lib" then became a trendy one within U.S. upper-middle-class white liberal circles), it's likely that NAL's editorial department boss was a more conscious bourgeois feminist in her political views than Marge was in the mid-1970s, when I was publicity clerkin' under the two of them at New American Library.
Many years later, I noticed some info appearing on the internet that seemed to indicate that this same NAL editorial director may have graduated from Barnard College in the early 1960s--in the years before historical events and Columbia Students for a Democratic Society [SDS] chapter campus organizing had eventually politically radicalized many Columbia and Barnard students.
And many years later, I also noticed some info appearing on the internet that seemed to indicate that some of the post-World WarII baby-boom fiction writers (who weren't ever as politically or culturally radical as most pre-World War II-born novelists or Movement activists, like Marge Piercy, Carl Oglesby and Abbie Hoffman, or most pre-World War II-born or post-World War II baby-boom 1960s underground New Left Movement writers)--like Maine-based left-liberal Stephen King (who still believed in the 21st-century that the Warren Commission's "official" version of what happened in Dallas, Texas between November 22, 1963 and November 25, 1963 was true)--were promoted within the paperback book publishing world by this particular white upper-middle-class woman NAL editor in the 1970s.
Not sure, myself, how true the info on the internet I came across was. But most of the writers who became best-selling U.S. fiction book authors in the late 1970s and in the 1980s pretty much failed to reflect the literary values and historical social/economic realities experienced by most hip counter-cultural, post-WWII baby-boom working-class people of all racial backgrounds, in their fiction.
So the class situation reality, middle-class life interests, fantasies, values and ideological/political perspective of the NAL editor likely were reflected by the particular best-selling U.S. fiction writers whose literary careers she chose to promote, I suspect.
