A former longtime editor in chief of Harvard University Press, Aida DiPace Donald turned to writing full time after retiring, publishing two biographies of presidents before she drew from her own experiences for a volume of poetry.
In perhaps a nod to the less visible roles editors perform behind the scenes, she began her poem “The Open Way” with the couplet:
Ring no bells when I am gone
I lived life unheralded.
Her work drew more attention than the poem suggests. In 2007, when Dr. Donald published her Theodore Roosevelt biography, “Lion in the White House,” Kirkus Reviews praised her for taking on a “daunting task: compressing the crowded life of Theodore Roosevelt into fewer than 300 pages.” Publishers Weekly complimented her second biography, “Citizen Soldier” (2012), saying she succeeded in making Harry Truman “much more than a silent commander of a failed watch” through her portrait of “a fully formed man of sizable defects and masterful achievements.”
Dr. Donald, who also donated thousands of books from her personal library to colleges and archives, died Sept. 4 in Londonderry, N.H. She was 93 and had previously lived for many years in Lincoln.
Among her greatest coups as editor in chief of Harvard University Press was her instrumental role in publishing “One Writer’s Beginnings,” a book version of lectures Eudora Welty delivered at Harvard in 1983. It was the academic publishing house’s first bestseller in its 71-year history.
“It was selling so many copies that the Harvard Press had to buy trainloads of paper,” said Lindsay Waters, who retired after serving as the press’s chief humanities editor.
Reached by phone at her Jackson, Miss., home in 1984 when the book hit The New York Times bestsellers list, Welty told the newspaper: “I’m thrilled to pieces. It was the last thing I expected.”
As editor in chief, Dr. Donald relished the unexpected, publishing histories of women and youth when those fields were all but untouched, and ensuring that the press’s books were accessible to a wider variety of readers.
“She believed that good ideas and good scholarship had something that could enlighten a larger group of people and she wanted to bring more scholarly books to that reading audience,” said Joyce Seltzer, who formerly was senior executive editor of history and contemporary affairs for Harvard University Press.
Dr. Donald began at the press as an acquisitions editor and rose to become editor in chief.
“I had this enormous power to acquire books, to write the contracts, to work with foreign publishers, to work with agents,” she said in a 2012 C-SPAN interview, “and I loved it.”
And when she turned to writing full time in retirement, those editing years helped shape her books. By then she had a sharp eye for what did and didn’t work on the page.
“You learn something about writing,” she said of editing.
“I read hundreds of manuscripts over the years. You learn what is good writing and what is not good writing,” she told C-SPAN. “And I was very particular. If even a quasi-famous author submitted a manuscript and it was badly written, I would turn it down or I would say, ‘Please get some help. Get yourself an editor and rewrite this. It’s an interesting story, whatever it was, but it’s badly written.’ Of course, I made a few enemies by doing that.”
There were other authors, of course, “who wrote like a dream,” she said. “And I loved publishing them.”
Born in New York City in 1930, Aida DiPace was one of four siblings.
Her parents, Bessie and Victor, were Italian immigrants. Dr. Donald’s mother had arrived as a baby, but her father wasn’t allowed to go to the United States until he completed military service, she told C-SPAN.
Victor was assigned to the king’s guard, she said, and because the king loved opera, her father spent considerable time at the famous La Scala opera house in Milan.
“My father became a great opera lover, so when his second daughter was born — moi — he named me Aida,” she said of being named after a Verdi opera.
She graduated with a bachelor’s degree from Barnard College in New York City and wanted to be a journalist — she had been editor in chief of her high school and college newspapers.
“My history professor said, ‘If you want to be a journalist, you have to know something. So get some history degrees, learn history. Journalists don’t know enough history,’” she recalled. “And so I thought that was good advice.”
Dr. Donald said she “fell in love with history” while getting a master’s at Columbia University. She then graduated with a doctorate in history from the University of Rochester in New York and studied at Oxford University in England on a Fulbright fellowship.
She was a history instructor at Columbia and an editor at Johns Hopkins University Press before joining the Harvard University Press editing staff.
In 1955, she married historian David Herbert Donald, who went on to teach at Harvard and twice win the Pulitzer Prize for biography. He died in 2009.
“She was a formidable intellect and my dad was, too, so it was a matter of great privilege to live in their house and hear their conversations,” said their son, Bruce of Chapel Hill, N.C.
Writers such as Gore Vidal or “luminaries from the history department” might stop by for a glass of wine and stay for dinner.
“The conversations really were wide ranging,” Bruce said. “They were incredibly perceptive about books and literature.”
As a writer, Dr. Donald took a different approach than other historians, one that went beyond writing shorter biographies.
“My books are about character formation and they’re intimate,” she told C-SPAN.
In “Citizen Soldier,” she examined topics such as how Truman struggled to sidestep the corruption of Kansas City’s Democratic machine while rising in politics; his devotion to his wife, Bess; and his decision to approve dropping atomic bombs on Japan to end World War II.
“This short book is written for a general reader,” she said in the introduction. “It is a narrative, a conversation with the reader, and not freighted with notes. I am reaching out for understanding, if not for sympathy, for those whose story this is.”
The family will hold a private service for Dr. Donald, who in addition to her son, leaves a brother, Joseph DiPace of Virginia, and two grandchildren.
“Aida really was a very special woman of her time,” said Seltzer, her former Harvard University Press colleague.
“She was quite brilliant and very incisive and she was aggressive. She knew what she wanted,” Seltzer said. “She could be a stern taskmaster, but what I think she valued more than anything else was good scholarship and important ideas, and how do we get them out, and how do we get them to a broader public.”
In an author’s bio titled “A Life in Words” that appeared in her book of poetry, Dr. Donald said that studying the work of poet Elizabeth Bishop inspired her to begin writing poems.
Though as a historian and editor, Dr. Donald imposed order on the past and on the page, her own life seemed to have unfolded “Without a plan, or knowingly,” she wrote in her poem “The Open Way”: “Only looking back gave it shape.”
Bryan Marquard can be reached at bryan.marquard@globe.com.