Stanley Marshall Rinehart Jr. was born on August 18, 1897 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the son of Stanley Marshall Rinehart, a physician, and Mary Ella Roberts, a former nurse who, as Mary Roberts Rinehart, became a best-selling author. Rinehart's early boyhood home in Allegheny, Pennsylvania, was solidly middle-class. In 1911, thanks to his mother's literary successes, the family moved to an estate in the Pittsburgh suburb of Sewickley. As a teenager he traveled in Europe.
Rinehart attended the Morristown School, a private institution, and entered Harvard University in 1915. Except for his performance in mathematics, his college record was undistinguished, and he even failed an English course. He did, however, impress the literature professor Charles Townsend Copeland with his writing ability. When the United States entered World War I, Rinehart dropped out of Harvard to enlist in the army. Initially denied a commission, he was sent to France with the Eighty-second Infantry Division. Later, having been promoted to second lieutenant, he trained officers and served as an aide-de-camp. Nonetheless, he regretted not being stationed at the front.
Rinehart took a job in the advertising department of the George H. Doran Company, where his responsibilities included selling space in the house's publication The Bookman.
His mother bought him a financial interest in the concern, and Doran welcomed his leadership and business acumen. Within the next few years, he served successively as advertising manager, secretary, and a director of the company. In those capacities, he worked closely with John Farrar, who had become the Bookman's editor in 1920 and editor in chief of the publishing house in 1925.
Rinehart's brother Frederick also became a Doran employee in 1924. Interested in relinquishing control of the firm to his young associates, the aging Doran tendered the stock to the Rinehart family, but they refused his terms.
In 1927, Doran accepted a merger offer from Doubleday, Page, forming Doubleday, Doran and Company. The partnership appeared promising, for both were respected houses with strong lists. The Rinehart brothers and Farrar were to manage the firm together with Nelson Doubleday. Yet, because all of the parties involved were outspoken individualists, the combination proved unworkable.
On June 4, 1929, Rinehart, his brother, and Farrar left to form their own publishing house, Farrar and Rinehart.
Rinehart and his partners sold their first list, which included novels by Mary Roberts Rinehart and DuBose Heyward, by traveling from bookshop to bookshop. The first month's sales totaled $26, but by September they had reached $46, 000; in less than two years the firm required larger quarters. The company's only disastrous venture was a game book called Speculation (coincidentally issued the day of the 1929 stock market crash), which sold no copies.
In 1931, Farrar and Rinehart bought the Cosmopolitan Book Corporation, thereby acquiring such writers as Faith Baldwin, Rex Beach, and Ruth Suckow. Some of the firm's other authors in the 1930's were Philip Wylie, Upton Sinclair, Floyd Dell, and Stephen Vincent Benét. The house's greatest success came with Hervey Allen's long historical novel Anthony Adverse (1933), which sold over a million copies by the mid-1930's.
The company also added a college textbook department in 1934. In his role as president of the firm, Rinehart exemplified the willingness of new, young publishers in the interwar period to abandon the genteel restraint of their predecessors in favor of an unabashed treatment of books as commodities. He explained, "The publishing office of today is no den of graybeards solemnly reading and conferring"; quoting one of his authors, he described it as more like "a boiler factory. "
Rinehart's unprecedentedly aggressive promotion of Anthony Adverse revealed his acceptance of commercialism. He sent letters to the trade almost three months before publication, tantalized potential readers with an advance syllabus for the book, and kept up a barrage of advertising after it appeared. In addition, he priced the book at a low $3 per copy, gambling that sales would offset the high cost of printing such a lengthy volume.
In 1930, Farrar and Rinehart participated in the then-controversial practice of price-cutting, entering the dollar fiction market. The firm also ran manuscript contests, courted reviewers, and held special events to publicize its offerings.
He and Farrar hired attractive Harvard and Yale graduates from literary families who gave the office a glamorous, cosmopolitan tinge. Allen and Benét served as close advisers, the latter considering himself virtually a member of the firm. During World War II, Farrar took a leave to work for the Office of War Information. Rinehart, who resented Farrar's preoccupation with outside interests, bought him out and dissolved the firm.
On January 1, 1946, he and Frederick Rinehart established Rinehart and Company, which in the late 1940's published Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead, Frederic Wakeman's The Hucksters, and Charles Jackson's The Lost Weekend. In 1948 the firm started Rinehart Editions, a paperback reprint series for college students. In the 1950's the quality of the house's trade list deteriorated. Having grown tired of the business and skeptical of its future, Rinehart sold it in 1960 to Henry Holt and Company, which then became Holt, Rinehart and Winston. He stayed on as senior vice-president and director of the new firm until his retirement in 1963.
He died in South Miami, Florida.
Rinehart was, at six feet, two inches tall, with black hair and brown eyes, what a writer in the Saturday Review of Literature called "a casting director's dream of a handsome, sophisticated publisher. "
He married Mary Noble Doran on May 24, 1919, and they had two children. Rinehart married Frances Alice Yeatman on July 28, 1933; they had one child.
