The Harold Longman Award
Co-Founder of Soundview Executive Book Summaries


Awarded annually in a vote by Soundview Subscribers to the Best Business Book of the Year.

Harold Longman was born in San Francisco in 1914, the son of English immigrants who’d themselves come to the UK from Lithuania. The family moved frequently around the city, usually to one immigrant neighborhood or another, a fact that probably accounted for Harold’s extraordinary openness to and interest in different cultures and languages.
A bookish kid, he spent a lot of time on his own. He went to college at Berkeley, working his way through to an English degree in a variety of jobs, the longest lasting of which was as a chicken butcher. After college, he went into advertising as a writer, starting with small local agencies and then moving to New York. Jobs were scarce in the early 40s; he ended up spending a summer at Grossinger’s resort in the Catskills as the editor of its newspaper.

Drafted for World War II, he became a radio gunner in a B-17 squadron, flying his 50 bombing missions over Sicily and Italy before being shipped back to the states as a trainer. His war diaries – a soldier’s life in North Africa and Italy – make piquant reading: unvarnished views of his fellow air corpsmen, their explorations of the bazaars, bars and nightlife; their fights, their boredom, and their fear.

In New York once again, Harold resumed his career in advertising, slipping into the bohemian life of Greenwich Village, where he wrote stories – few if any published – and was drawn into the circle of the iconoclastic psychoanalyst, Wilhelm Reich. It was in New York in the late 40s that he met his wife, Dorothy, whom he married in 1949. Two years later their first son was born and a few years after that they moved from Greenwich Village first, and briefly, to Long Island and then to Connecticut, where their second son was born.
Meanwhile, Harold’s career in advertising was blossoming. He had joined BBDO, rising to creative director and penning a variety of well-known ads, coining, among other slogans, “Us Tarryton smokers would rather fight than switch,” providing an inspiring example of grammatical decay for a generation of English teachers. He was also writing children’s plays – few of which were produced, but which did lead him to a parallel career as a children’s book author. He penned half-a-dozen books, all remarkable for their wordplay – Harold excelled at puns – and for the fact that they spoke to kids not as from adult to child, but as person to person. Among his books: The Wonderful Tree House, The Kitchen Window Squirrel, and the remarkable The Fox in the Ballpark, an unsentimental story of a bookish kid from an immigrant neighborhood – in the Bronx, not San Francisco – who, in the midst of winter, discovers a fox and her pups living in Yankee Stadium.

After ten years at BBDO, Harold left to work in a few other agencies before joining the publishing world as head of Macmillan & Co.’s book club division. With $5 million in sales when he joined, it had reached $30 million by the time he retired in 1978. He didn’t in fact retire: in part based on a phenomenon he’d noticed at Macmillan – that there were lots of books written and published, but few read–he co-founded Soundview (the concept was quickly copied by his former colleagues at Macmillan), building it into a profitable venture before selling out his interest in 1986 to publisher Cynthia Langley Folino.

Retiring again in the mid 1980s, Longman returned to book writing, not quite finishing a manuscript on remarkable old people when, after a five year battle with lung cancer, he died in 1989, age 75.

In October 2003 Soundview established the Harold Longman Award for Best Business Book of the Year in honor of this person who loved and excelled in the world of books and words.