John Turner Sargent, Sr. was president and CEO of the Doubleday and Company publishing house from 1963 to 1978, taking over from the previous president, Douglas Black.
Sargent, Sr. is the son of Charles S. Sargent (a partner in Hornblower & Weeks, a securities concern in New York), and a graduate of St. Mark's School and attended Harvard College. On or around May 17, 1953,[1] he married Neltje Doubleday (granddaughter of the late Frank N. Doubleday, who founded the company in 1897), who he divorced sometime before December 21, 1985, when he married Elizabeth Nichols Kelly. He is also a trustee of the New York Public Library, the New York Zoological Society and the American Academy in Rome.[2]
Also in 1985, around September 17, he became chairman of the executive committee at Doubleday, succeeded by Nelson Doubleday, Jr..[3]
In 2006, the John Sargent Sr. First Novel Prize literary prize was established in his honor by the Mercantile Library Center for Fiction in New York.[4]
John Turner Sargent, Jr., his son, is a graduate of Stanford University, was a business associate in the publishing division of Doubleday & Company, and married Constance Lane Murray September 21, 1985.
Sargent Jr. is the current CEO of Macmillan Publishers USA, the American operations of Georg von Holtzbrinck Publishing Group and a longtime member of the Graham Windham Board of Directors and former Chairman of the Board.[5][6]