Thomas Dunne Books

• 1. Introduction

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  Thomas Dunne Books was an imprint of St. Martin's Press that spent more than three decades publishing popular trade fiction and nonfiction, from 1986 until April 2020. In that time it built a roster that ranged from Joe Haldeman's science fiction classic The Forever War to Bernie Sanders's Our Revolution, from Michael Palin and the members of Monty Python to Ralph Nader. What drove an imprint with that kind of breadth to make some of the most controversial publishing decisions of the 1990s? And what eventually closed its doors for good? The answers involve a Holocaust denier, a convicted car-bomber, a resignation in protest, and a global pandemic.

• 2. The Irving Controversy

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  In 1996, the imprint signed David Irving to write a biography of Joseph Goebbels. Irving was described publicly as a scholar, and the project looked, on paper, like a serious work of history. Then it became known that Irving had ties to the Institute for Historical Review, which was characterized as "the literary center of the United States Holocaust-denial movement." The imprint had to drop the book entirely. The episode was an early signal that Thomas Dunne Books operated in contested territory, willing to take on provocative projects but not always able to anticipate where the provocation would lead.

• 3. Fortunate Son and Its Fallout

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  In October 1999, St. Martin's Press recalled a Dunne title called Fortunate Son: George W. Bush and the Making of an American President, and destroyed copies of the book. The author, J. H. Hatfield, had served prison time for a car-bombing attempt on his former boss's life. The book also contained an anonymous accusation about Bush. The recall came after those facts about Hatfield surfaced publicly. A St. Martin's executive editor resigned in protest over the decision to have published the book at all. The fallout extended into the imprint's own internal structure. By November of that year, Dunne editors had stopped attending St. Martin's editorial meetings and had started holding their own instead.

• 4. Macmillan Films

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  In October 2010, Thomas Dunne Books launched Macmillan Films, a production venture built around the imprint's catalog. Its most notable project was a docudrama series called Gangland Undercover, based on a book the imprint had published in 2013: Vagos, Mongols, and Outlaws: My Infiltration of America's Deadliest Biker Gangs, by Charles Falco and Kerrie Droban. The venture was eventually renamed Macmillan Entertainment. By April 2020, the division's own website listed no staff, no products in development, and no available properties.

• 5. Downsizing and Closure

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  In June 2016, the trade publication PublishersLunch reported that Thomas Dunne Books had been downsized to four employees. The reduction was a sign of the pressures that smaller imprints faced within large publishing conglomerates. The final blow came in April 2020, when St. Martin's Press eliminated the imprint entirely. The stated reason was "implementing a job reduction action and hiring freeze" driven by the economic strain of the COVID-19 pandemic. The imprint that had published authors as varied as Homer Hickam, D.C.A. Hillman PhD, and John Hart was gone after thirty-four years.