Donald E. Herdeck

Donald E. Herdeck (November 19, 1924 – April 20, 2005) was an American academic and publisher, and the founder in 1973 of Three Continents Press.

Biography

Donald Elmer Herdeck was born on November 19, 1924, in Chicago, Illinois. In the early 1950s, he traveled in Europe and studied in Italy and France. He subsequently taught at Girard College in Philadelphia, while doing graduate studies at the University of Pennsylvania.

Joining the US Foreign Service in 1953, Herdeck spent some years in Italy, and in 1960 he was posted to Guinea in West Africa, developing an interest in African literature. He said: "I started reading African novels. I was surprised to know there were any. I'd never heard of any. First in English, but then I started buying titles published in French." However, while in Africa he fell ill with malaria and hepatitis and returned to the US.

He began teaching in the English department of Georgetown University, Washington, D.C., in 1965, and in 1974 became an associate professor of English and foreign service, In 1988, one of Herdeck's authors, the Egyptian novelist Naguib Mahfouz, was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, and another future Nobel Prize winner on the Three Continents list was Saint Lucian poet Derek Walcott. Over the years that he ran Three Continents Press, the imprint published some 300 titles, and he was once quoted as saying: "We've published people from every continent except Antarctica. We don't do anything there, but if the penguins learned to write, we would."

Herdeck suffered a stroke in February 1995, and in August 1996 sold 167 of his titles to Lynne Rienner, another Colorado publisher; however, he subsequently set up a new company, Passeggiata Press, for the titles to which he retained rights.

He was the editor or author of the key reference books African Authors, 1300–1973 (1973; revised edition, 1974) and Caribbean Writers: A Bio-Bibliographical-Critical Encyclopedia (1979, co-edited with his wife Margaret Herdeck, Maurice Lubin, John Figueroa and Dorothy Figueroa, and Jose Alcantara), and in 1998 Appreciating the Difference: The Autobiography of Three Continents Press, 1973–1997.

Herdeck died of congestive heart failure at his home in Pueblo, Colorado, in 2005, aged 80.