While an assistant editor at W.W. Norton in 1983, DAN SIMON began editing books on the side for Glenn Thompson of Writers and Readers. Mr. Thompson offered Simon an imprint the next year, to allow him to reissue the works of Nelson Algren, which at that time were completely out of print; these books were published under the "Dan Simon/Four Walls Eight Windows" imprint. For the next eleven years, Simon edited and published books independently. In 1995, he founded Seven Stories Press, with many of the writers he had published in the prior decade.

His books include Run, Run, Run: The Lives of Abbie Hoffman, coauthored with Jack Hoffman (Tacher/Putnam, 1995); Van Gogh: Self Portraits by Pascal Bonafoux, translated by Daniel Simon (Wellfleet Press, 1989); Nonconformity: Writing on Writing by Nelson Algren, edited by Daniel Simon and C.S. O'Brien with an afterword by Daniel Simon (Seven Stories Press, 1996); the 50th Anniversary Critical Edition of The Man with the Golden Arm by Nelson Algren, edited by Daniel Simon and William J. Savage (Seven Stories Press, 1999); and Entrapment and Other Writings by Nelson Algren, edited by Brooke Horvath and Dan Simon (Seven Stories Press, 2009).

To celebrate the centennial of Nelson Algren's birth, Simon, with Barry Gifford, adapted a script based on Algren's work, entitled Nelson Algren Live, which was performed at the Steppenwolf Theatre in Chicago in April 2009.

Simon was named a Chevalier in the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, by order of the French Minister of Culture, in 1996.