As the younger Schiffrin recalls in his autobiography, A Political Education: Coming of Age in Paris and New York (2007), he thus experienced life in two countries as a child of a European Jewish intellectual family.
He attended Yale University, where he won the Alpheus Henry Snow Prize, and Clare College, Cambridge, where he studied English on a Mellon Fellowship for two years and edited the student literary magazine Granta.
[4] Schiffrin was the managing director of publishing at Pantheon Books, where he was partially responsible for introducing the works of Pasternak, Foucault and others to American readers.
[1] In 1992 Schiffrin, with former Pantheon colleague Diane Wachtell, established the non-profit The New Press,[1] explaining that he did so because of economic trends that prevented him from publishing the serious books he thought should be made available.
[1] Although there exist no English versions of L'édition sans éditeurs or Le contrôle de la parole, there is some overlap of content between The Business of Books and the former.