Stephen Rubin, a publisher who helped make John Grisham and Dan Brown famous writers, and who published Michael Wolff’s 2018 chronicle of the Trump White House, Fire and Fury, died on Oct. 13 in Manhattan. He was 81.

“Trying to publish big-ticket best sellers is the riskiest game you can play,” Mr. Rubin wrote in his memoir, Words and Music: Confessions of an Optimist. “But it has been my modus operandi.” Among his successes are John Grisham’s first novel, A Time To Kill; Dan Brown’s The DaVinci Code, Killing Lincoln by Bill O’Reilly and Martin Dugard; Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time; and Lauren Weisberger’s The Devil Wears Prada.

In his memoir, he said, “In an era when social media and cable television dominate the conversation, it is thrilling that one lone book could cut through all the static and have a profound effect on an entire nation.”