Heidi Toffler, "a researcher and editor who for decades served an essential though anonymous collaborative role alongside her celebrated husband, Alvin Toffler, in producing global bestselling books about the consequences of rapid change," died February 6, the New York Times reported. She was 89. She spent years "ignoring appeals from Mr. Toffler and her friends to take credit for her work publicly."
Their first book, Future Shock (1970), sold in the millions, was translated into dozens of languages and brought Alvin Toffler, who died in 2016, international fame. The Times noted that Heidi Toffler's "importance to the couple's book-writing enterprise emerged gradually." Future Shock was dedicated to her, their daughter and his parents; The Third Wave to her "professionalism as an editor" that was "reflected on every page"; and in the preface to Power Shift: Knowledge, Wealth, and Violence at the Edge of the 21st Century (1990), she was identified as co-author.
"I don't know where her brain ends and mine begins," Alvin Toffler told the New York Times in 2006. "She brings a kind of skepticism that saved me many times from saying foolish things.... She is very smart. I write. But she's the house critic who understands the ideas and how they should be structured."
In 1993, both of their names finally appeared together on War and Anti-War: Survival at the Dawn of the 21st Century. She was subsequently credited as the co-author of Creating a New Civilization: The Politics of the Third Wave (1995) and Revolutionary Wealth: How It Will Be Created and How It Will Change Our Lives (2006).
"The idea of having a byline didn't really do anything for me,” she told the Times in 1993. “But each set of acknowledgments in each book was more effusive and fulsome. The feminist movement put a lot of pressure on me and said I was a very poor role model.
"And then men would come up and say, 'We just wanted to tell you we think you have such a wonderful husband for giving you all that credit'--implying that I wasn't doing any work. That finally pushed me over the edge."