M. Lincoln Schuster

Max Lincoln Schuster was born to a Jewish family on 2 March 1897 in Kałusz, then in Austria-Hungary and now in Ukraine, and came to the United States as a child. He entered college at sixteen and took a degree from Columbia's journalism school in 1917. In 1924 he and Richard Simon founded Simon & Schuster, whose first book was a collection of crossword puzzles that no one else had thought to publish; it sold in the hundreds of thousands. He was the editorial half of the partnership, and with Simon and Robert de Graff he was instrumental in Pocket Books, which from 1939 sold paperbacks for twenty-five cents in drugstores, railway stations and army camps and put books within reach of people who had never bought one.