Marianne Mantell, Who Helped Pave the Way for Audiobooks, Dies at 93
In her early 20s, she co-founded the groundbreaking spoken-word record label Caedmon. The label's first hit was Dylan Thomas's A Child's Christmas in Wales.
Marianne Mantell died at home in Princeton, N.J., on January 22. In her early 20s, she co-founded a record label that recorded literary giants such as Ernest Hemingway and James Joyce, and turned them into mass market entertainment.
Michael Mantell, her son, said that the cause was a fall.
Ms. Mantell, then Marianne Roney, was a 22-year old struggling freelance writer when, in 1952, she and Barbara Holdridge, a former Hunter College classmate in New York City (then Barbara Cohen), founded Caedmon Records. This pioneering spoken word label specialized in great literature.