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Summary
Summary
Winner of the Anne M. Sperber Prize
A spirited and revealing memoir by the most celebrated editor of his time.
After editing The Columbia Review , staging plays at Cambridge, and a stint in the greeting-card department of Macy's, Robert Gottlieb stumbled into a job at Simon and Schuster. By the time he left to run Alfred A. Knopf a dozen years later, he was the editor in chief, having discovered and edited Catch-22 and The American Way of Death , among other bestsellers. At Knopf, Gottlieb edited an astonishing list of authors, including Toni Morrison, John Cheever, Doris Lessing, John le Carré, Michael Crichton, Lauren Bacall, Katharine Graham, Robert Caro, Nora Ephron, and Bill Clinton--not to mention Bruno Bettelheim and Miss Piggy. In Avid Reader , Gottlieb writes with wit and candor about succeeding William Shawn as the editor of The New Yorker , and the challenges and satisfactions of running America's preeminent magazine. Sixty years after joining Simon and Schuster, Gottlieb is still at it--editing, anthologizing, and, to his surprise, writing.
But this account of a life founded upon reading is about more than the arc of a singular career--one that also includes a lifelong involvement with the world of dance. It's about transcendent friendships and collaborations, "elective affinities" and family, psychoanalysis and Bakelite purses, the alchemical relationship between writer and editor, the glory days of publishing, and--always--the sheer exhilaration of work.
Photograph of Bob Gottlieb © by Jill Krementz
Author Notes
Robert Gottlieb (1931 - 2023) was a legendary book editor and writer who shaped the modern literary canon. He was editor-in-chief of Simon and Schuster, the head of Alfred A. Knopf, and editor of The New Yorker . He contributed frequently to The New York Times Book Review, The New Yorker, and The New York Review of Books, and the New York Observer as dance critic. His books include Great Expectations: The Sons and Daughters of Charles Dickens, George Balanchine: The Ballet Maker, Sarah: The Life of Sarah Bernhardt, Avid Reader: A Life, and a collection of essays Near-Death Experiences . . . and Others . In 2015, he was presented with the Award for Distinguished Service to the Arts by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. A documentary film exploring his fifty-year relationship with the writer Robert Caro, Turn Every Page, was released in 2022.
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Gottlieb (Great Expectations: The Sons and Daughters of Charles Dickens), the former head of the Alfred A. Knopf publishing house and ex-editor of the New Yorker, looks back on his exploits taming America's literary lions in this canny, exuberant memoir. He frames his breezy, loose-limbed narrative around vignettes of his dealings with people in the publishing world and, especially, with the authors he edited, including Lauren Bacall, Robert Caro, John Cheever, Bill Clinton, Joseph Heller, and Toni Morrison. His lengthy account of his controversial 1987 takeover of the New Yorker editorship from the legendary William Shawn-outraged staffers asked him to turn it down-unfolds into a good-humored but probing inquest into the magazine's cloistered culture. Another section follows his adventures on the board of the New York City Ballet, with brilliant choreographer George Balanchine and brilliant impresario Lincoln Kirstein. Gottlieb's portraits of the literati are vivid, usually generous, and always clear-eyed (thriller writer Michael Crichton, he allows, has a knack for catchy conceits, although "what [he] wasn't was a very good writer"). Gottlieb's depictions of editing sessions really shine as he describes helping each author sculpt a book into its ideal form, and he conveys the enormous energy and creativity of American publishing. Photos. (Sept. 13) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Gottlieb's constant and eclectic reading, along with a series of flukes, delivered him to the publishing world, the ideal arena not only for his passion for books but also for his boundless energy and gift for fruitful collaborations. An exceptionally accomplished and influential editor and the author of numerous profiles (Lives and Letters, 2011) and biographies (Balanchine, Bernhardt), Gottlieb now tells his many-faceted life story with zest and precision, candor and humor, tracing his path to Simon & Schuster in 1955, and chronicling choice editorial adventures there and during his time at the helm of Knopf and the New Yorker. Gottlieb shares his heady experiences working with such literary standouts as Joseph Heller, Robert Caro, Toni Morrison, Doris Lessing, and John le Carré, and tells incisive tales of helping the famous craft their memoirs, including Bill Clinton and National Book Award-winner Lauren Bacall. Though he avers, Work is my natural state of being, clearly his longtime marriage to actor Maria Tucci and his close friendships with writers and publishing professionals, so eloquently celebrated here, have inspired and sustained him. While book lovers will revel in Gottlieb's intimate publishing revelations, his memoir is also a vital, generous, and captivating story of a life lived to the fullest.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2016 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
ROBERT GOTTLIEB'S BUOYANT memoir of his indefatigable editorial career proves Noël Coward's observation that work is more fun than fun. Gottlieb is willing, in fact, to go beyond that: "From the start, words were more real to me than real life, and certainly more interesting." The range of what he read - "from Racine to nurse romances" - always remained even wider than the multi-browed spectrum of material he published at Simon & Schuster and Alfred A. Knopf. His life has been a busman's holiday without any brakes - he was once at the hospital with his wife, "checking over Cynthia Ozick galleys while helping count ... contractions" - and his gift as an editor was to grasp that every book is both ineffable (tone is "something that, if it's wrong, no editor can fix") and improvable ("cutting... will edge a book closer to its Platonic self"). Now 85, Gottlieb has spent much of the last two decades as a writer himself, and he does a fine, fast job of evoking his 1930s and '40s New York boyhood as the only child of a fairly chilly marriage. For whatever warmth he needed, there were always the books, as well as the era's "sweet popular culture" of radio serials, magazines and major league baseball, all of this at the bottom of a ladder leading upward toward Gilbert and Sullivan and then Balanchine, whose New York City Ballet became, after books, a second imaginative home. After Columbia and Cambridge came Simon & Schuster, a carnival of publishing whose lists had lots of down-market moneymakers ("those crossword puzzle books!") and whose upper management had its down-low mores: "The men had a tendency to marry each other's mistresses." Gottlieb began as an editorial assistant, a position that was entry-level in about the same way the Pearly Gates of heaven are. "I was sticking my nose into everything, because everything fascinated me," he notes. He made his mark writing ads with Nina Bourne, an elegant industry legend: "The joy of it! Nina curled up in her desk chair, pecking away at her typewriter, a cigarette dangling from her fingers or burning out in her ashtray. ..." The long S&S chapter, a love song that is the best stretch of the book, includes Gottlieb's great editorial successes with Jessica Mitford's gleeful muckraking of the funeral industry ("The American Way of Death") and Joseph Heller's "Catch-22" - "still the book I'm most closely associated with," one whose author showed a "total lack of defensiveness" while being edited. Gottlieb exhibits a modest defensiveness of his own in recounting how, after "several years of back-and-forth" editorial work, he rejected "A Confederacy of Dunces," whose wildly eccentric author, John Kennedy Toole, later committed suicide and whose "horrifying mother, Thelma" (the heroine of other accounts), conducted a nasty and anti-Semitic "campaign of vilification" against the editor. All he ever wanted, Gottlieb insists, was autonomy, not power, and the reason he left for Knopf at the age of 36 was a restlessness that came over him when "everything had become all too easy and comfortable for me - life in the office was like a daily party." He took Bourne with him. Gottlieb says he "never had a long-range plan for Knopf," a house that was distinguished but, by 1967, creaking with bureaucratic routine. The new chief's ad hoc instincts soon had hits coming thick and fast - and sometimes very slowly: Gottlieb describes his creative and contentious dealings with Robert Caro, whereas Toni Morrison ("We were meant for each other") delighted his blue pencil. The Knopf stretch of "Avid Reader" gallops through the glamour of Lauren Bacall, who wrote her memoirs on the company premises; the popular histories of Barbara Tuchman ("Her sense of entitlement was sometimes hard to deal with") ; and the evolution of Salman Rushdie ("From the moment he won the Booker he seemed more demanding, less cordial"). Gottlieb confesses to the writers he was sorry to lose (Don DeLillo, Robert Stone) and the occasional good riddance (Harold Brodkey), but he throws so many bouquets that the perfume can sometimes give the reader a bit of a headache. Books are again and again "rapturously" received, and "Liv Ullmann is not only a beauty, a talent and a grand woman, she's a pro." The least revealing tale may involve working on Bill Clinton's memoirs: "I never encountered a mind that grasped things more rapidly. ... He was a complete professional." This isn't the sort of thing Gottlieb typically let his own authors get away with. The long association with Knopf was interrupted for five years, beginning in 1987, when its parent company's owner, S.I. Newhouse, who also ran the Condé Nast magazine empire, took advantage of a new spate of Gottlieb's restlessness and persuaded him to take over The New Yorker from its seemingly eternal editor, William Shawn. The baroque drama that ensued - Shawn left people in doubt as to whether he had resigned or been fired; the staff protested the new editor's arrival - has been much chronicled over the years, and Gottlieb now offers his own restrained supplement to all that. Once he was allowed to establish himself at the magazine, he followed no more of a long-range plan than he had at Knopf, making modest, incremental changes, most notably to the publication's rule-bound fiction. But these modifications wouldn't be enough for Newhouse, a man subject to his own bursts of restlessness; in 1992 the owner opened the windows on 43rd Street to the hurricane that was Tina Brown. Gottlieb, almost embarrassed by the generosity of his severance package, returned to Knopf and refused a salary. All the books in "Avid Reader" do make way for some pages about the author's non-print life. One learns of his eight years in "strict Freudian therapy," a deep interior dive that he knows must now seem antique, not to mention surprising, in light of the gusto he displays on nearly each page. (Bourne described him as "psychosomatically healthy.") He presents his long, happy second marriage to the actress Maria Tucci and their difficulties raising a son with symptoms of the as-yet-unnamed Asperger's syndrome. As for his compulsion to collect plastic handbags (he wrote a book about them), the most consoling piece of information imparted to the reader may be that the handbags have competition from other collectibles. Some of this memoir's keenest pleasures come from a series of portraits that demonstrate how the author's most profound associations and friendships have been with women, whether Nina Bourne or Nora Ephron or the British literary agent Deborah Rogers. He makes clear that they offered him, like fiction, a compass by which to move in the world. Gottlieb's closeness to the New York agent Candida Donadio eventually came to "an ugly end," but during his happy days at S&S, he and this excitable, sometimes vengeful talent-spotter shouldered each other's troubles; or, as Gottlieb puts it, borrowing a phrase from another intimate, Irene Selznick, "took in each other's washing." He says that work has been his "natural state of being," and everything in "Avid Reader" convinces one that that's so. But it was the brightness and vivacity of all these women that kept the lights on, at the office and in his mind. Collaborating with Toni Morrison, Robert Caro, Joseph Heller and Lauren Bacall. THOMAS MALLON'S most recent book, "Finale: A Novel of the Reagan Years," has just been published in paperback.
Library Journal Review
Turning his passion for reading and books into a distinguished career as an editor and writer, Gottlieb (Great Expectations) helped shape the American literary landscape for 60 years. In this memoir, he mixes details about his childhood and family life with colorful anecdotes of his professional achievements. Starting out and building his reputation as a hardworking editor at Simon & Schuster and then at Knopf, he was instrumental in publishing some of the most celebrated authors of the 20th century, including Joseph Heller, Toni Morrison, and John Cheever. He also spent time as editor of The New Yorker and worked with the city ballet companies of New York and Miami. Gottlieb relished the long hours of editing a manuscript and carefully fostered nurturing relationships with his authors. Yet, at the heart of his story are his relationships with loved ones and how they contributed to his life's path. VERDICT Journalism students, those interested in a publishing career, and bibliophiles alike will appreciate the warmth and humor that punctuate this fascinating story of an "avid reader" who finds joy in work and life. [See Prepub Alert, 3/14/16.]-Donna Marie Smith, Palm Beach Cty. Lib. Syst., FL © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Table of Contents
| Note | p. xi |
| Reading | p. 3 |
| Learning | p. 12 |
| Working: Simon and Schuster | p. 36 |
| Working: Alfred A. Knopf | p. 101 |
| Working: The New Yorker | p. 198 |
| Working: Knopf Redux | p. 237 |
| Dancing | p. 261 |
| Writing | p. 290 |
| Living | p. 306 |
| Acknowledgments | p. 325 |
| Index | p. 329 |