Draft:Hugh Rawson

Hugh Rawson (September 12, 1936 - June 1, 2013) was an American editor and author.

Early life and education

Rawson was born on September 12, 1936. He was raised in Mamaroneck, New York with two sisters and a brother. His father was an editor, writer, and magician. He was educated in the Rye Neck school system until he was a sophomore in high school. At the age of fifteen, he received a Ford Foundation scholarship to Yale University. He graduated in 1956. After college, he was in the United Stares Army medical corps for two years.

Career

After the army, Rawson worked as a reporter for The American Banker and as an editor for a weekly McGraw-Hill business magazine.

He then went into book publishing. He worked for Thomas Y. Crowell Co. where he ran the trade department. After the sale of Crowell, he started working several different jobs for publishers and freelancing.

Was director of Penguin USA’s reference books operation.

For 12 years, he was editor of the Bulletin of The Authors Guild.

columnist on American words and phrases for American Heritage magazine

wrote a blog on language for The Huffington Post.

Not long before he died, he worked for a year as the assistant of William Safire on the last edition of Safire’s Political Dictionary.

Books

• Rawson’s Dictionary of Euphemisms & Other Doubletalk
• Wicked Words
• Devious Derivations
• Unwritten Laws: The Unofficial Rules of Life as Handed Down by Murphy and other Sages
• co-authored with Hillier Krieghbaum An Investment in Knowledge

collaborated with his wife, Margaret Miner on four dictionaries of quotations:

• The Oxford Dictionary of American Quotations
• The New International Dictionary of Quotations
• A Dictionary of Quotations from the Bible
• A Dictionary of Quotations from Shakespeare: A Topical Guide to Over 3,000 Great Passages from the Plays, Sonnets, and Narrative Poems
• American Heritage Dictionary of Quotations

External links

• Hugh Rawson at The Huffington Post
• Hugh Rawson at American Heritage