Malcolm Margolin

Malcolm Margolin (October 27, 1940 – August 20, 2025) was an American author, publisher and the onetime executive director of Heyday Books, an independent nonprofit publisher and cultural institution in Berkeley, California. From his founding of Heyday in 1974 until his retirement at the end of 2015, he oversaw the publication of several hundred books and the creation of two quarterly magazines: News from Native California, devoted to the history and ongoing cultural concerns of California Indians, and Bay Nature, devoted to the natural history of the San Francisco Bay Area. In the fall of 2017, he established a new enterprise, the California Institute for Community, Art, and Nature (California ICAN) to continue and expand upon the work that he began more than forty years ago.

Margolin was the author and editor of several books including The Ohlone Way: Indian Life in the San Francisco-Monterey Bay Area, named by the San Francisco Chronicle as one of the hundred most important books of the twentieth century by a western writer. His essays and articles have appeared in a number of periodicals including The Nation, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the Los Angeles Times.

Early life and education Margolin was born in Boston, Massachusetts, on October 27, 1940 to a Lithuanian mother and an American father in a Jewish family. He attended Boston Latin School He met his wife Rina while attending Harvard; she was a psychology major at Radcliffe College. an organization devoted to California folk arts, and has served on its board since its beginning. In 2001, he co-founded Inlandia Institute, a literary center in Riverside, California.

He had served on the Publication Committee of the Book Club of California and devoted time and effort to a number of environmental, cultural, and social justice organizations and causes.

Personal life and death From the late 1960s onward, he lived in Berkeley, California,