Larry Ashmead

Lawrence Peel "Larry" Ashmead (July 4, 1932 – September 3, 2010) was an American book editor who helped create many books featuring such authors as Isaac Asimov, Quentin Crisp, Tony Hillerman, Susan Isaacs, Michael Korda, and Helen Van Slyke, for a series of publishers including Doubleday, Simon & Schuster, Lippincott, Harper & Row and its successor HarperCollins.

Ashmead was born on July 4, 1932, in Rochester, New York. He later recalled having been a model for a Kodak photograph and then seeing an enlargement of his picture blown up to billboard size when visiting Grand Central Terminal and assumed that they did that for all visitors. When he was nine years old he heard a writer speak at a local library and was less fascinated by the author's writing than by the fact that he worked amid the skyscrapers of Manhattan editing books. He attended the University of Rochester and quit after two years to serve in the United States Army. After completing his military service, he studied for a doctorate in geology from Yale University as part of a program where the cost of his education was covered by an oil company. He did not complete his Ph.D, and though he was expected to work for the company after completing his education, he decided to abandon the topic, making what he called the "only bold decision of my life".

He began work as an assistant for Doubleday, where his scientific education resulted in him being given an assignment to work on a book written by Isaac Asimov in which Ashmead identified many apparent errors that he discussed with the author. Though Asimov was able to show in almost all cases that his writing was correct, he was impressed that anyone would devote so much attention to a manuscript and asked that Ashmead be assigned to edit his books.

A resident of Stuyvesant, New York, Ashmead died at age 78 on September 3, 2010, in Columbia County, New York due to pneumonia. His partner, Walter Mathews, had died during 2004.