Jovanovich, William.

William Jovanovich (1920-2001) was an American publisher, author, and businessman, who served from 1954 to 1991 as the president of the publishing firm Harcourt Brace & Company. The firm was renamed Harcourt Brace Jovanovich in 1970, when Jovanovich became the chief executive officer. Born in a coal-mining camp in Louisville, Colorado, to a Polish mother and a Montenegrin father, Jovanovich learned English in elementary school, completed his undergraduate degree at the University of Colorado, and studied English and American literature at Harvard University. His graduate studies were interrupted by World War II, when he left school to serve as an officer in the U. S. Navy. After the war, Jovanovich returned briefly to his studies at Columbia University where he worked on a dissertation on Ralph Waldo Emerson. In 1943, he married Martha Evelyn Davis, with whom he went on to have three children. Due to financial hardship, Jovanovich left Columbia in 1947 to join Harcourt Brace & Company as a traveling college textbook salesman. He was promoted to head of Harcourt's school division in 1953 and became president of the company the following year at age 34.

Jovanovich was an innovative figure in the publishing industry. He popularized the use of colorful illustrations in textbooks, and he is credited with starting the first imprint, now a common feature of most major publishing houses. He persuaded Helen and Kurt Wolff of Pantheon Books to join Harcourt by allowing them to publish books under their own trade name. He made unconventional business decisions for a publisher, such as relocating the publisher's headquarters from Manhattan to Orlando and purchasing Sea World marine parks. Under his direction, Harcourt became one of the largest textbook publishers, while continuing to publish a variety of internationally known authors, including Mary McCarthy, Hannah Arendt, Italo Calvino, Alice Walker, Octavio Paz, Umberto Eco, and Charles and Anne Morrow Lindburgh. Jovanovich maintained close working relationships with certain authors, including Mary McCarthy and Charles A. Lindbergh, whose posthumous autobiography Jovanovich edited. Over the course of Jovanovich's term as chairman, Harcourt transformed from a small publishing house into a diversified company with annual sales of over a billion dollars. In the late 1980s, the company took on massive debt in a successful but ultimately damaging strategy to thwart a hostile takeover by the British publisher Robert Maxwell, leading to Jovanovich's resignation as president in 1990.

Jovanovich also wrote and published a number of his own books throughout his lifetime, including the essay collection Now, Barabbas (1964), the novel The World's Last Night (1990), the memoir The Temper of the West (2003), and several others. He also maintained a lifelong dedication to promoting the works of Yugoslav authors, the value of education, and the cause of Serbian nationalism. He died in San Diego, California, in 2001 at age 81.