When Lisa Lucas was hired in the summer of 2020 to take a big job at the country’s largest book publisher, there was a sense that things were finally starting to change in what has long been an overwhelmingly white industry.

Lucas, who became the publisher of Pantheon and Schocken, imprints within Penguin Random House, was an unusual choice for the job. Executives in the book business often spend decades working their way up the ranks. While Lucas was a well-known figure in the literary world — she had previously been the executive director of the National Book Foundation, which administers the National Book Awards — she had never worked in corporate publishing.

Lucas’s hiring was written up in major news outlets as evidence that publishers were committed to diversifying. As the first Black person to run Pantheon in its 80-year history, and one of the few Black women to head a major publishing division, she faced enormous pressure. Not only did she need to learn quickly on the job and succeed as a publisher, she was also saddled with expectations that she would help drive change at a moment when publishers faced calls to diversify their catalogs and companies.

“There’s pressure on you when you’re one of few,” Lucas said in an interview this summer. “That was a lot to lay on me.”

This May, Lucas was abruptly let go, informed of her firing just a few hours before it became public. The news stunned some in the literary world who saw Lucas, 44, as a tastemaker and rising talent, and as someone who could help discover and champion writers of color.