Carol Southern Keneas, Renowned Editor, Dies

Carol Southern Keneas

Carol Southern Keneas, well-known editor and former wife of famed writer Terry Southern, died on Saturday, July 2 in Manhattan, after complications from surgery for cancer.

Ms. Southern, a book editor who made her mark on the publishing world at Random House in the 1980s, first became known for her style books and is credited with discovering Martha Stewart. She edited a wide range of books, with attention to detail and clarity, including “Pollack,” which won the Pulitzer Prize for biography in 1981. She was also said to have been responsible for the success of the Angelina Ballerina books.

“Without Carol, her loving encouragement and deft touch—there would be no Angelina Ballerina,” said Katherine Holabird, author of the Angelina Ballerina series. “We owe it all to her.”

Born in Silver Springs, Maryland, Carol née Kauffman was an art student living in Greenwich Village who also attended Bank Street School. Her major was child development. In 1955, she met Terry Southern, a writer newly returned from Paris, who had just been published in Harper’s magazine—Mr. Southern’s first appearance in print in the United States—at a party at photographer Robert Frank’s loft. The novelist and screenwriter, produced works such as “Dr. Strangelove,” “Easy Rider,” “Candy” and “The Magic Christian” that established him as a ’60s icon, even appearing on the cover of “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” album.

After they married and lived on a barge in the Hudson River, they moved to Geneva, where Ms. Southern worked at the United Nations School as an elementary school teacher from 1956 to 1960.

Once the couple returned to Manhattan, they soon became a part of a vibrant literary circle that included writers such as William Styron, George Plimpton, Peter Matthiessen, John Marquand, Larry Rivers, Jerry Leiber, and playwrights Arthur Kopit, Jack Gelber, and Arnold Weinstein.

“She was a very luminous person and just wonderful to be around,” said novelist and short story writer James Salter who often met with the Southerns. “There was an aura about her that you just had to respond to,” he said.

Both Mr. Salter and Peter Matthiessen, fellow novelist, nonfiction writer and environmentalist, described Ms. Southern as having a “wonderful smile.”

Mr. Matthiessen met Ms. Southern under “unusual circumstances” in Greenwich Village in the 1960s.

“There was a beautiful young girl at the table, but she never introduced herself,” he said. “After we met we became good friends.”

Although her marriage ended in 1965, Ms. Southern continued to be close to the “Quality Lit” crowd, as Mr, Southern used to describe the group.

Later, Ms. Southern married Alex Keneas, a film critic for Newsday, who was of Greek descent. She recently edited and helped to publish a book in English by her companion in Greece, George Passpati.

Ms. Southern was executive editor of Clarkson Potter Publishers, part of the Random House group, from 1976 to 1981. From 1981 to 1993, she was editor-in-chief of Clarkson Potter, and in 1993 was awarded her own imprint at Random House: Carol Southern Books.

For the last decade or so, she was semi-retired from publishing, having returned to her original passion, painting. Her watercolors were recently exhibited in a one-woman show at a gallery in Athens’s Kolonaki Square.

Ms. Southern rented homes in Southampton to Amagansett summer after summer, until buying a small house in Sag Harbor. After the death of her husband, Alex Keneas, she sold it and bought an old home in North Haven, where she spent much time over the past 20 years.

She is survived by her son, Nile Southern and his wife, Theodosia Southern; and two granddaughters, Nefell and Chloe Southern.

Ms. Southern was interred at Sag Harbor’s Oakland Cemetery, in a Buddhist ceremony, on Tuesday, July 5.