James Thomas Fields was born in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, the son of a sea captain who died when James was a small boy. At fourteen he went to Boston to work as a clerk in a bookshop on the corner of Washington and School Streets, known ever since as the Old Corner Bookstore. He read everything, remembered customers’ tastes, and worked his way up until he became a partner in the firm, which became Ticknor and Fields.

Fields had a gift for writers. In 1849 he went to Salem to visit Nathaniel Hawthorne, who had just lost his job at the customs house and was depressed and short of money. Fields asked whether he had anything ready to publish. Hawthorne said no. As Fields was leaving, Hawthorne ran after him on the stairs with a bundle of manuscript, saying it was either very good or very bad, he didn’t know which. It was the beginning of The Scarlet Letter. Fields published it in 1850, and it made Hawthorne’s name.

Over the next two decades the firm published an extraordinary list: Hawthorne, Longfellow, Emerson, Thoreau’s Walden, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and American editions of Tennyson, Browning and Dickens. At a time when American publishers could legally reprint British books without paying their authors anything, Fields made a point of paying them. From 1861 to 1871 he edited The Atlantic Monthly, the leading literary magazine of its day.

He and his wife, the writer Annie Adams Fields, made their house on Charles Street in Boston a meeting place for writers on both sides of the Atlantic. Fields helped organize Charles Dickens’s great reading tour of America in 1867 and 1868, which drew enormous crowds. After his retirement he wrote Yesterdays with Authors (1872), warm recollections of the writers he had known, and lectured about them.

He died in 1881. On the last day of the year, it is worth remembering the people who do this quieter work: who read manuscripts, pay writers fairly, and carry books from a writer’s desk into readers’ hands.