John S. Zinsser Jr., who as editor of Reader’s Digest Condensed Books in the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s made nearly 800 carefully crunched versions of popular books available to millions of readers, died May 27. He was 84.

The cause was a heart attack, his son Stephen Wadsworth Zinsser said.

Zinsser was associate editor, executive editor and later editor in chief of Reader’s Digest Condensed Books from 1951 to 1987.

The series, which began in 1950 and ran 47 years under that name, provided subscribers with three to six shortened best sellers in anthologies that were, at first, published four times a year, and later every other month. It is now known as Reader’s Digest Select Editions.

Among the authors whose works were edited under Zinsser were William Faulkner, Herman Wouk, John Steinbeck, Daphne Du Maurier, Thor Heyerdahl, John P. Marquand, Frederick Forsyth, Ken Follett, James Herriot, Peter Benchley and John le Carre.

“He believed ardently in the Digest’s populist mission of making well-written books with strong stories and interesting characters available to people who might not otherwise be readers,” Stephen Zinsser said of his father.

Jonathan Sharman Zinsser Jr. was born in Manhattan on June 20, 1923, a son of John and Isabella Wadsworth Zinsser. His father was a vice chairman of the Merck pharmaceutical company. Zinsser’s undergraduate studies at Harvard were interrupted by Navy service in World War II. He received his bachelor’s degree from Harvard in 1946 and an MBA there in 1948.

After working on the copy desk at Newsweek, he joined Reader’s Digest in 1951.

Brevity was important to Zinsser. When he retired in 1987, he told Publishers Weekly, “I do wish that all the books weren’t so long and getting longer,” adding that “the days of a good story told in a reasonable number of pages — like ‘Cry, the Beloved Country’ in 283; ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ in 296 — seem gone.”

Stephen Zinsser, a theater and opera stage manager, recalls sitting beside his father during a Metropolitan Opera performance of Richard Strauss’ “Rosenkavalier,” with its talky libretto by Hugo von Hofmannsthal.

“I said, ‘You look worried,’ and he said: ‘It’s good. But it needs cutting.’”