NEW YORK — Jason Epstein, a publishing innovator and bon vivant who helped put the classics in paperback, co-founded The New York Review of Books and worked with such novelists as E.L. Doctorow, Vladimir Nabokov and Philip Roth, has died at age 93.

Epstein died Friday "surrounded by his books" at his home in Sag Harbor, N.Y., said his wife, the author and former New York Times journalist Judith Miller. The cause was congestive heart failure, she said.

The book world has its share of accidental lifers and Epstein was one. Once a young bohemian who desired only enough money to have time for reading, he took a job at Doubleday in the early 1950s, joined Random House in 1958 and remained for decades as editorial director. He became one of the industry's most honored executives, receiving lifetime achievement awards from the National Book Foundation, presenters, of the National Book Award, in 1988; and from the National Book Critics Circle in 2002. Epstein was not just a man of letters, but of food and drink, whose own books included the memoir "Eating" and whose dining companions ranged from Buster Keaton to Jacqueline Kennedy to the notorious attorney-political operative Roy Cohn.