Elizabeth Maguire, 47; Publisher Worked With Nonfiction Writers

Elizabeth Maguire, 47, a publisher of noted wit and passion who in a 25-year career worked with historians, theologians and other nonfiction authors, died April 8 of ovarian cancer at a hospice in New York City, the Perseus Books Group announced Monday.

Since 2002, Maguire had served as publisher of Basic Books, an imprint of Perseus.

Maguire’s many writers included historian Richard Brookhiser, theologian George Weigel, Harvard University professor Henry Louis Gates and cultural critic Michael Eric Dyson, who in a statement praised her as a “world-class thinker and my mind’s most faithful companion.”

“She nurtured in me and so many other writers a hunger for conceptual rigor, literary beauty and moral clarity,” said Dyson, author of “Holler If You Hear Me.”

Born in New York City, Maguire majored in English at Harvard, graduating magna cum laude in 1980. For six years, she was executive editor of Oxford University Press, where she edited Joan D. Hedrick’s Pulitzer Prize-winning “Harriet Beecher Stowe.” Maguire also worked at Cambridge University Press, Addison Wesley Longman and the Free Press before joining Basic Books in 2000.

Maguire wrote the novel “Thinner, Blonder, Whiter,” published by Carroll & Graf in 2002, and had recently been working on a novel about the 19th century author Constance Fenimore Woolson.