The publisher Jerome Lindon's books were impounded, his apartment was bombed and he was repeatedly fined by French courts for opposing the 1954-1962 Franco-Algerian war. "I am Samuel Beckett's publisher," he said in his own defence. "When one has this chance and this honour . . . the least one can do is defend the conditions of freedom where they are threatened."
Three days after he died on April 9th aged 75, Jerome Lindon was buried near Beckett in the Montparnasse cemetery.
The men were close friends for nearly 40 years. Beckett's wife Suzanne, submitted the Molloy trilogy to Jerome Lindon at Les Editions de Minuit in 1950. The manuscript had been rejected by every major French publishing house, but as he began reading the text in the Metro, he recalled later, "Suddenly nothing else mattered. I couldn't understand how people could fail to be dazzled by such a meteor."
Jerome Lindon often said Les Editions de Minuit would not have existed without Beckett, but then Beckett might not have been published without Lindon. Both men served in the French Resistance. They were similar in character, distaining social life but loyal in friendship, combining deep pessimism with energy and enthusiasm.
When Beckett won the Nobel Prize in 1969, Jerome Lindon sent a telegram to him on holiday in Tunisia. "I advise you to hide yourself," the publisher warned. He went to Stockholm to receive the award on Beckett's behalf, speaking of the writer's "absolute distress" at having been chosen. As Beckett's literary executor after his death in 1989, he became famous for defending the writer's work against sloppy interpretation.
Jerome Lindon was only 23 when his upper middle-class family purchased the struggling Editions de Minuit, where he already worked. The publishing house had started during the Nazi occupation when Jean Bruller, printed Le Silence de la Mer, a haunting tale of a German officer billeted in a French home, under the pen-name Vercors. The underground publisher produced 25 books during the war, all at night - hence the name. Because he ran Minuit for 53 years, he was often mistakenly described as its founder.
When he published Molloy in 1951, Beckett remarked, "He's terribly nice, this young chap, especially when I think he's facing bankruptcy because of me." That same year he moved the publishing house to a former bordello in the Rue BernardPalissy, near the Flore and Deux Magots literary cafes. The Molloy trilogy was a success, like the theatrical hit of 1953, Waiting for Godot, also published by Jerome Lindon.
Although his authors won two Nobel Prizes and three Prix Goncourt, he never published more than 20 books a year, never hired more than nine staff and never moved from his tiny headquarters. He often spoke of the need to publish "books that the public don't want". He made the break with traditional aesthetics and political rebelliousness - hallmarks of Les Editions de Minuit.
A literary critic at Le Monde first used the term Nouveau Roman to describe writers published by Jerome Lindon in the 1950s, including Marguerite Duras, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Claude Simon (who won the Nobel Prize in 1985), Michel Butor, Nathalie Saurraute and Robert Pinget, who became a close friend of Beckett. The group was characterised by meticulous description and disregard for storyline. A generation later, Jerome Lindon would "discover" some of France's most prominent present-day writers, including Jean Echenoz and Jean Rouaud, both of whom won the Goncourt. He also published the philosophers and sociologists Jacques Derrida, Karl Jaspers, Herbert Marcuse and Pierre Bourdieu.
Jerome Lindon was the grand nephew of the French car manufacturer Andre Citroen. His family was of Polish-Jewish origin, and he joined the Combat Resistance group in Provence in 1942, aged 17, ending the war in Germany in Gen de Lattre's First Army. Throughout his life, he took risks and showed moral courage - in publishing unknown or controversial authors, and in opposing the Algerian war. He fought the commercialisation of the publishing industry and ultimately prevented the French retail chain, FNAC, from selling books at cut prices.
But most of all, Jerome Lindon is remembered as Samuel Beckett's publisher. The novelist Marie Ndiaye was 17 years old when the publisher accepted her first manuscript. To reassure the young woman before she signed her contract, she told Liberation, Jerome Lindon told her he had given her book to Beckett to read. "He always talked about Beckett like a first love which one never really gets over," Ndiaye said.
Jerome Lindon married Annette Rosenfeld in 1947. Their daughter Irene now runs Les Editions de Minuit. He is also survived by sons Andre and Mathieu, who is a journalist at Liberation.
Jerome Lindon: born 1925; died, April 2001