Fred Hills has had a home on Shelter Island for more than 25 years, and one of his very first achievements here was to obtain a library card. In the past year, as his retirement progressed and work loads lightened, he became a Trustee of Friends of the Shelter Island Public Library, and in 2011, was elected to the Board of Trustees of the Library itself.
Fred’s career, if not his life, has been devoted to books and literature — 26 years at Simon & Schuster where he was Vice President, Senior Editor, and member of the Editorial Board, prior to which he was Editor-in-Chief of the General Books Division of McGraw-Hill. Among his many successful authors are Vladimir Nabokov, short story writer Raymond Carver, Nobel Prize laureate Heinrick Boll, Pulitzer Prize winners William Saroyan, Justin Kaplan, and Daniel Yergin, as well as best selling writers as varied as M. Scott Peck, Jane Fonda, and Arianna Huffington. In a long career, one of his notable contributions to the world of books was persuading his teenage buddies not to soap the picture windows of his local library on mischief night before Halloween.
Fred received his bachelor’s degree from Columbia and his master’s degree in English from Stanford. He is married to the writer Kathy Matthews and lives in Westchester and (most of the time) on Shelter Island, where his son Ted works as a staff reporter at The Shelter Island Reporter.
