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Alan J. Hruska is a corporate litigator with a second, far-reaching career as the founder of the independent publishing house Soho Press, which invests in serious fiction by anonymous authors; as a novelist; As a writer, director, and producer of plays and films, he died on March 29 at his home in Manhattan. He was 88 years old.
Bronwen Hruska, the daughter of the publisher of Soho Press, said the cause was lymphoma.
Mr. Hruska published his first novel in 1985, after spending forty years there, even before retiring from his day job at Cravath Swaine & Moore in New York in 2001. The following year, with his wife, Laura Chapman Hruskaand Juris JurjevicsHe founded Soho Press, being the former editor-in-chief of Dial Press.
Soho Press gained its reputation by accepting unsolicited manuscripts from little-known authors. Mr. Jurjevics said their goal is to “have a certain percentage of growth per year and not be bought by anyone”.
Manhattan-based Soho Press specializes in literary fiction and memoirs, with a backlist that includes books by Jake Arnott, Edwidge Danticat, John L’Heureux, Delores Phillips, Sue Townsend, and Jacqueline Winspear. The company also has a Soho Teen young adult imprint, and a Soho Crime imprint that publishes mysteries in exotic places by Cara Black, Colin Cotterill, Peter Lovesey, and Stuart Neville, among others.
Mr. Hruska (pronounced RUH-ska) said there is often a lesser than apparent professional disconnect between law practice and literature. Both have been done successfully, he said, when it comes to storytelling, whether it’s discussing a case in a legal brief or writing a novel, screenplay, or screenplay.
“I was a litigation attorney, and while I expect my actors to remember their lines better than my witnesses, there is less of a difference between the two professions than you might think,” he said in an interview. with a blogger in 2017.
“An essay and a play are both productions,” he added. “Bringing each one together involves telling a story. So is writing a short essay to a panel of judges or giving an oral discussion. If you don’t tell a story, you will most likely put them to sleep.”
Alan Jay Hruska was born on July 9, 1933, in the Bronx and grew up in Far Rockaway, Queens. His father, Harry Hruska, was in the textile business. His mother, Julia (Schwarz) Hruska, was a housewife.
Alan took hold of filmmaking at the age of 8 before deciding on a career.
After graduating from Lawrence High School on Long Island, he earned a bachelor’s degree in economics from Yale in 1955 and was persuaded to apply to Yale Law School by a college professor impressed by his logic and rationalization skills. He too saw law as an ideal tool for writing and reasoning.
He graduated from law school in 1958, the same year he married Laura Mae Chapman, one of three women in law school.
He died in 2010. In addition to her daughters, she is survived by her two sons, Andrew and Matthew; Julie Iovine, the former correspondent of The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, whom he married in 2013; and six grandchildren.
Mr. Hruska, “The Wrong Man Run” (2011); “Forgive the Ravens” (2015); “It Happened at Two in the Morning” (2017), which The Wall Street Journal said showed the author “his best thriller writing”; and “The Incredible Arts” (2019).
He also wrote and directed the romantic comedy Nola, starring Emmy Rossum, which was screened at the 2003 Tribeca Film Festival.
His other films include “The Warrior Class,” a comedy about a rookie lawyer that premiered at the Hamptons International Film Festival in 2005; and “The Man on Her Mind,” an existential comedy based on his play of the same name, which premiered at London’s Charing Cross Theater in 2012.
He made his theatrical debut by directing “Waiting for Godot”, which was revived for Off Broadway in 2005. Ten years later, when a surreal play about love, marriage, and an impending hurricane began, critic Alexis Soloski wrote: Times In 2015, he said, “If an existential philosopher takes on a light romantic comedy, it might sound a bit like Alan Hruska’s ‘Laugh, Look, Look Down’ at the Cherry Lane Theatre.”
Mr. Hruska oversaw a wide variety of civil cases at Cravath in the 44 years before retiring in 2001. He was appointed senior lawyer in 2002. He also served as the secretary of the New York Bar Association.
Asked American Lawyer In 2015, although he felt that the law was not his real mandate, he replied: “Not at all. I had a wonderful experience. I’ve filed about 400 cases, won 200 and settled on 200. I’m particularly proud of settlements because they can put people in a much better position than winning a case.”
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