DAVID HIGHFILL
The creative process can be solitary and unending (art is hard work after all!)—but it can be a source of rich discovery and accomplishment as well. Few things match the joy I feel when I’ve helped a writer unlock the story that they are burning to tell. I’ve been working with writers of fiction and nonfiction for decades now, and it’s still one of the things that gets me up in the morning. It can be a challenging puzzle, but it’s also great fun.
I spent more than 30 years at big five houses in New York, the last 16 of those as a VP and Executive Editor at William Morrow/HarperCollins Publishers. Before that I held positions at G.P. Putnam’s Sons and Avon Books. As a freelance editor my services include project development; analyzing and shaping outlines and proposals; and big-picture, structural work on manuscripts as well as more granular attention to sentences, graphs and chapters.
On the fiction side, my specialties are crime, thriller and commercial fiction. In narrative nonfiction, I focus on biography and autobiography, American history and politics, military affairs, pop culture and the entertainment world, stories from the American South, investigative journalism, true crime and LGBTQ+ stories. I’ve edited numerous bestselling novels by Lee Child, Patricia Cornwell, Greg Iles, Brad Meltzer, Matthew Quirk, Sarah Pinborough, Brad Taylor, Wiley Cash, Peter Swanson, Elmore Leonard, Tom Franklin, Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan, Steve Martini, S.J. Bennett and Don Winslow among others.
Some narrative nonfiction titles are Patricia Cornwell’s Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper—Case Closed, Debbie Cenziper’s and Jim Obergefell’s Love Wins: The Lovers and Lawyers Who Fought the Landmark Case for Marriage Equality, Evan Wright’s Generation Kill: Devil Dogs, Iceman, Captain America, and the New Face of American War, Christopher Mason’s The Art of the Steal: Inside the Sotheby’s–Christie’s Auction House Scandal and T.J. English’s The Corporation: An Epic Story of the Cuban American Underworld. Works of biography and autobiography include Chesley ‘Sully’ Sullenberger’s Highest Duty (with Jeff Zaslow), Goldie Hawn’s A Lotus Grows in the Mud (with Wendy Holden), Edith B. Gelles’s Abigail & John: Portrait of a Marriage, Al Michaels’s You Can’t Make This Up (with Jon Wertheim) and Joe Posnanski’s The Soul of Baseball.
“David is the second-most important person (after the author!) in the genesis of the Jack Reacher series... His editing was kind, subtle, wise and scalpel-sharp perceptive.”
“I’ve worked with David on many books (most of my career), and nobody is better! He understands artists, and I can’t recommend him more.”
“David was a sharp, meticulous and incredibly capable editor, totally focused on telling a great story. He improved the narrative structure and pacing with smart ideas and then dove into a deep line edit, sentence by sentence, word by word.”