About

As a senior editorial executive at several of America’s largest publishing houses, Paul Golob has spent more than three decades bringing to the public influential ideas and compelling narratives written by leading journalists, scholars, public figures, and other noteworthy individuals, on topics that include American history and politics, biography, international relations, social issues, sports, and the arts. He has published bestsellers as well as books that advance our understanding of the world.

Paul was most recently executive editor at Henry Holt and Company, where he oversaw the acquisition, development, and publication of works of narrative and explanatory nonfiction. During his time at Holt, he was for ten years the editorial director of the Times Books imprint, where he was the publisher’s principal liaison to The New York Times. In this role, he oversaw the publication of books by Times reporters that were published through a joint venture with the newspaper. He also published the American Presidents Series, for which the historians Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. and Sean Wilentz have served as general editors. In 2007 Paul discussed the series on C-Span, and the video is available here.

Paul began his career in trade book publishing in 1986 and has held senior positions at Random House, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, and PublicAffairs. He has also been an editor on the Op-Ed page of The New York Times and the editor of New Republic Books, the book publishing arm of The New Republic magazine.

Among the authors Paul has published are President Jimmy Carter, National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, Senator Gary Hart, and civil rights leader Vernon Jordan; the scholars Bernard-Henri Lévy, Graham Allison, Annette Gordon-Reed, Timothy Naftali, Susan J. Douglas, and Benjamin Carter Hett; the Hall of Fame basketball coach John Thompson, former major leaguer Doug Glanville, and sportswriters Seth Davis, Joe Drape, Ira Berkow, and George Vecsey; the cultural icons Dick Cavett, Peter Asher, and Sid Caesar; and a long line of journalists that includes Carl Bernstein, Jim Dwyer & Kevin Flynn, Linda Greenhouse, Diana B. Henriques, Dave Itzkoff, Stephen Kinzer, James Kirchick, Nicholas D. Kristof & Sheryl WuDunn, Howard Kurtz, Bill McKibben, Souad Mekhennet, Pamela Paul, Todd S. Purdum, Eugene Robinson, Jeffrey Rosen, Elaine Sciolino, Michael Tomasky, and Jacob Weisberg.

Paul is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and has been an editorial fellow at the Jerusalem International Book Fair, a media fellow at Stanford University, a young leader of the American Swiss Foundation, and a publisher representative to the Society of American Historians. He has also been a guest lecturer at Columbia University, New York University, and Princeton University, and a judge for several literary prizes, including the Arthur Ross Book Award, the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography, and the J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Award.

Paul is a magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, where he studied history and literature and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa.

He lives in New York City and hopes that next year the Mets will win the World Series.