Doubleday Makes First Sloan Picks

Gerald Howard has signed Edward Ball, Mark Kurlansky, Jane Smiley and Walter Mosley to write the first four books in Doubleday's joint Great Innovators series with the Sloan Foundation. The eight-book series will consist of full-length biographies of innovators who changed America, and will launch with Ball's The Octopus and the Inventor: A Biography of Eadweard Muybridge in fall 2009.

Coming in 2010 are Kurlansky's bio of Clarence Birdseye, who revolutionized the food industry; Smiley's profile of John Atanasoff, inventor of the first electronic computer in the 1930s; and Mosley's bio of Percy Julian, a pioneer in the synthesis of medicinal drugs from plants and the first African-American chemist inducted into the National Academy of Sciences.

The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation is a philanthropic institution whose programs aim to increase public understanding of science and technology. Doubleday was chosen by the foundation in 2004, after meetings with a number of houses. The foundation paid over $1 million to underwrite the books. The authors are selected via committee; the authors choose their subjects. Doubleday holds world rights for all titles.