NEW YORK (AP) — Ashbel Green, an editor whose authors included Walter Cronkite, Vaclav Havel and President George H.W. Bush, has died. He was 84.

Publisher Alfred A. Knopf announced Wednesday that Green died Tuesday night while dining near his home in Stonington, Conn.

Known to his friends as "Ash," Green was an old-school editor who preferred a typewriter to computers and who was praised by The New York Observer as "an exemplar of elegance, decency and seriousness." Green acquired and edited hundreds of books and as managing editor at Knopf looked through the endless unsolicited manuscripts known as the "slush pile."

He persuaded Gabriel Garcia Marquez to switch publishers, worked on Cronkite's memoir and a foreign policy book by Bush and helped discover the crime classic "The Friends of Eddie Coyle."

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