W. Drake McFeely (born c. 1954) is the chairman and president of the independent and employee-owned American publisher W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.

Education and career

McFeely attended Phillips Exeter Academy and earned his B.A. in Fine Arts from Amherst College in 1976. After graduation, he was hired by W. W. Norton as a college sales representative. He was named an editor in 1982, a vice president in 1990, and was associate director of the college division from 1993 to 1994. He became Norton’s fifth president in 1994, and was appointed chairman in 2000.

Notable editorial acquisitions

Originally the economics (''Economics'' and ''Economics of the Public Sector'' by

Joseph E. Stiglitz Joseph Eugene Stiglitz (; born February 9, 1943) is an American New Keynesian economist, a public policy analyst, and a full professor at Columbia University. He is a recipient of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences (2001) and the ...

, ''Intermediate Microeconomics'' by Hal R. Varian, ''Macroeconomics'' by Robert E. Hall and

John B. Taylor John Brian Taylor (born December 8, 1946) is the Mary and Robert Raymond Professor of Economics at Stanford University, and the George P. Shultz Senior Fellow in Economics at Stanford University's Hoover Institution. He taught at Columbia Univer ...

) and physics (''Physics'' by Hans C. Ohanian) editor in Norton’s college department, he still acquires and edits books in the trade division for Norton. He is the editor of a cluster of books each by Nobel Prize–winning authors

and

Paul Krugman Paul Robin Krugman ( ; born February 28, 1953) is an American economist, who is Distinguished Professor of Economics at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, and a columnist for ''The New York Times''. In 2008, Krugman was ...

, as well as

Fareed Zakaria Fareed Rafiq Zakaria (; born 20 January 1964) is an Indian-American journalist, political commentator, and author. He is the host of CNN's '' Fareed Zakaria GPS'' and writes a weekly paid column for ''The Washington Post.'' He has been a columni ...

Seamus Heaney Seamus Justin Heaney (; 13 April 1939 – 30 August 2013) was an Irish poet, playwright and translator. He received the 1995 Nobel Prize in Literature.

Sean Wilentz Robert Sean Wilentz (; born February 20, 1951) is the George Henry Davis 1886 Professor of American History at Princeton University, where he has taught since 1979. His primary research interests include U.S. social and political history in the ...

Steven Pinker Steven Arthur Pinker (born September 18, 1954) is a Canadian-American cognitive psychologist, psycholinguist, popular science author, and public intellectual. He is an advocate of evolutionary psychology and the computational theory of mind. ...

, and Ben Bernanke, among others. In 2004 he acquired the publishing rights to ''

The 9/11 Commission Report ''The 9/11 Commission Report'' (officially the ''Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States)'' is the official report into the events leading up to the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. It was prepa ...

'', which hit #1 on a number of online bestseller lists within hours of its release, as well as #1 on the ''New York Times'' bestseller list, going on to sell over a million copies as one of the bestselling government reports of all time.

Affiliations

McFeely also serves on the boards of the

Association of American Publishers The Association of American Publishers (AAP) is the national trade association of the American book publishing industry. AAP lobbies for book, journal, and education publishers in the United States. AAP members include most of the major commercia ...

National Book Foundation The National Book Foundation (NBF) is an American nonprofit organization established, "to raise the cultural appreciation of great writing in America". Established in 1989 by National Book Awards, Inc.,Edwin McDowell. "Book Notes: 'The Joy Luc ...

, and

Princeton University Press Princeton University Press is an independent publisher with close connections to Princeton University. Its mission is to disseminate scholarship within academia and society at large. The press was founded by Whitney Darrow, with the financia ...

Marriage

He is married to Karen McFeely (née Eliason).

References

External links

W. W. Norton & Company's website
* Living people American publishers (people) American chief executives Amherst College alumni American book editors Phillips Exeter Academy alumni Year of birth missing (living people) {{US-publish-bio-stub