Jackie O.’s years as editor are focus of new book

Jacqueline Kennedy's years as a book editor, many of them at Doubleday, will be the subject of a Doubleday book coming out in 2011.

Historian William Kuhn, who has written about British royalty and politics, is writing a biography, currently untitled, about the years that Kennedy worked in the publishing business, starting in 1975 with a brief time at Viking Press and then her 16 years at Doubleday, right up to her death in 1994.

Kennedy's authors ranged from celebrities Michael Jackson and Carly Simon to Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz, the Egyptian novelist.

“Her books were a way of revealing the experiences, recollections and passions of a lifetime; in the end she told her own story — her journey as a wife, a mother, aesthete, armchair intellectual and unwilling celebrity — through the medium of other people's books,” Kuhn said in a statement issued Monday by Doubleday.

“My book will mine this critical period in her life, the one in which she became the woman she'd always intended to be.”

According to Doubleday, Kuhn will draw upon “previously untapped archival material” and has “conducted a series of interviews with her authors, collaborators and friends from the 1980s and 1990s.”

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