Gary Fisketjon, Longtime Knopf Editor and Champion of DeLillo and McCarthy, Dies at 72

Gary Fisketjon, the book editor who worked with Don DeLillo and Cormac McCarthy, has died at the age of 72. Publishers Marketplace reported that he died over the weekend at his home in Salem, Oregon.

An editor is the person inside a publishing house who works closely with an author on a manuscript, questioning sentences, pushing for cuts and shaping a book before it reaches a reader. Fisketjon spent much of his career doing that work at Knopf, the New York publisher known for its literary list. He joined the house in the early 1990s and left in 2019.

Before Knopf, he had created Vintage Contemporaries, a line of contemporary fiction. He went on to edit and publish DeLillo and McCarthy, two of the most closely watched American novelists of their generations, and his name sits behind many of their books.

In his later years he worked with County Highway, a publisher that describes him as its literary editor. He was fiction editor of Panamerica, an imprint, meaning a labelled line of books that sits inside a larger company. County Highway runs Panamerica with fellow editor David Samuels, and Fisketjon helped launch it in 2025.

County Highway announced the death on social media on Sunday, 8 November. Its post carried the title "Gary Fisketjon is dead, and we invite you to mourn with us." The company called him its teacher, its friend and its favourite road-trip companion.

Editors rarely appear on book jackets, and their work tends to be invisible once a novel is finished. Fisketjon's career shows how much of a shelf of fiction depends on people who never take a bow. His death leaves a gap at a publisher that had only recently built a new imprint around him, and at a time when many readers will return to the books he helped bring into the world.