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This picture launched by Knopf reveals Robert Gottlieb. Gottlieb, the impressed and eclectic literary editor whose sensible profession was launched with Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 and continued for many years with such Pulitzer Prize-winning classics as Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Robert Caro’s The Energy Dealer, has died at age 92.
Michael Lionstar/Knopf through AP
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Michael Lionstar/Knopf through AP
This picture launched by Knopf reveals Robert Gottlieb. Gottlieb, the impressed and eclectic literary editor whose sensible profession was launched with Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 and continued for many years with such Pulitzer Prize-winning classics as Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Robert Caro’s The Energy Dealer, has died at age 92.
Michael Lionstar/Knopf through AP
NEW YORK — Robert Gottlieb, the impressed and eclectic literary editor whose sensible profession was launched with Joseph Heller’s “Catch-22” and continued for many years with such Pulitzer Prize-winning classics as Toni Morrison’s “Beloved” and Robert Caro’s “The Energy Dealer,” has died at age 92.
Gottlieb died Wednesday of pure causes at a New York hospital, Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group introduced. Caro, who had labored for many years with Gottlieb on his Lyndon Johnson biographies and was featured with him final 12 months within the documentary “Flip Each Web page,” mentioned in a press release that he had by no means labored with an editor so attuned to the writing course of.
“From the day 52 years in the past that we first checked out my pages collectively, Bob understood what I used to be making an attempt to do and made it potential for me to take the time, and do the work, I wanted to do,” Caro mentioned in a press release. “Folks speak to me about a number of the triumphant moments Bob and I shared, however immediately I keep in mind different moments, powerful ones, and I keep in mind how Bob was at all times, at all times, for half a century, there for me. He was a terrific buddy, and immediately I mourn my buddy with all my coronary heart.”
Tall and warranted, with wavy darkish hair and dark-rimmed glasses, Gottlieb had one of many biggest runs of any editor after World Warfare II and helped form the fashionable publishing canon. His credit included fiction by future Nobel laureates Morrison, Doris Lessing and V.S. Naipaul; spy novels by John le Carré, essays by Nora Ephron, science thrillers by Michael Crichton and Caro’s nonfiction epics.
He additionally edited memoirs by Katharine Hepburn, Lauren Bacall and Washington Put up writer Katharine Graham, whose “Private Historical past” gained a Pulitzer. Gottlieb so impressed Invoice Clinton that the previous president signed with Alfred A. Knopf partly for the prospect to work with Gottlieb on his memoir “My Life.”
Uniquely well-read and unstuffy, he was the uncommon soul who would declare to have completed “Warfare and Peace” in a single weekend (some studies narrowed it to a single day) and in addition collected plastic purses that crammed cabinets above his mattress. Gottlieb was as open to “Miss Piggy’s Information to Life” as he was to the works of Chaim Potok. On his desk for many years was a bronze paperweight, given to him when he began in publishing, etched with the phrases “GIVE THE READER A BREAK.”
Gottlieb’s fame was made throughout his time as editor-in-chief of Simon & Schuster and later Alfred A. Knopf, the place in recent times he labored as an editor-at-large. However he additionally edited The New Yorker for 5 years earlier than departing over “conceptual variations” with writer S.I. Newhouse and was himself an achieved prose stylist. He wrote dance criticism for The New York Observer and e book opinions for The New York Instances. He wrote a brief biography of George Balanchine, co-authored “A Sure Type: The Artwork of the Plastic Purse, 1949-59,” and edited well-regarded anthologies of jazz criticism and twentieth century music lyrics. His memoir, “Avid Reader,” got here out in 2016.
He was married twice, the second time to actor Maria Tucci, and had three youngsters. He was in any other case so absorbed in work — he was wanting over early proofs of a Cynthia Ozick e book whereas counting contractions for his pregnant spouse — that the creator Thomas Mallon summed up his life as a “busman’s vacation with none brakes.”
In “Flip Each Web page,” a joint biography of Caro and Gottlieb directed by the editor’s daughter, Lizzie Gottlieb, Robert Gottlieb referred to enhancing as “a service job.” He would remind himself that the books he pored over weren’t his personal, whereas additionally sustaining the best editor-writer relationship was “an equivalence of power,” wherein every shared the very best of their skills.
“I’m not egoless,” he acknowledged to his daughter.
Caro continues to be writing his fifth and presumed last quantity of the Johnson biographies, a collection begun practically 50 years in the past. A Knopf Doubleday spokesperson wouldn’t touch upon who would possibly function its editor.
Gottlieb thought of himself ‘a greater reader than anybody else’
Born and raised in Manhattan, Gottlieb would say he was born with “additional drive.” He was a lifelong bookworm who recalled taking out as much as 4 novels a day from his native public library. As a youngster, he would go to the library at Columbia College, wanting up previous copies of Publishers Weekly and learning the bestseller lists.
He ultimately attended Columbia, from which he graduated in 1952. After learning two years in England, at Cambridge College, and dealing briefly in theater, Gottlieb joined Simon & Schuster in 1955 as an editorial assistant, an upstart claiming he took the job to help his spouse and little one but additionally so assured that — even then — he regarded himself as “a greater reader than anyone else,” he recalled within the documentary.
Within the memoir “One other Life,” fellow Simon & Schuster editor Michael Korda would describe the younger Gottlieb as resembling “a kind of penniless perpetual college students in Russian novels,” his glasses so smeared that Korda was amazed he might see. By means of the unwiped lenses, Korda seen eyes that “had been shrewd and intense, however with a sure kindly humorous sparkle.”
Inside two years, he had taken on a former World Warfare II pilot named Joseph Heller and his partially written novel concerning the struggle titled “Catch-18.” As Heller later recalled, he wished an open thoughts to deal with his surprising satire and had been advised by his agent that Gottlieb was identified for being “receptive to innovation.” Gottlieb satisfied skeptical executives at Simon & Schuster to provide the novel an opportunity.
“The humorous elements are wildly humorous, the intense elements are glorious,” he advised the editorial board.
Gottlieb paid $1,500 for the novel, $750 upon signing Heller, $750 after publication. He additionally made some “broad solutions,” together with altering the title to “Catch-22,” to keep away from confusion with Leon Uris’ “Mila 18.” Launched in 1961 to an initially delicate response, the e book caught on after one other Gottlieb creator, humorist S.J. Perelman, really useful it to a New York Herald Tribune critic. “Catch-22” ultimately grew to become a blockbuster and counterculture touchstone, and Gottlieb grew to become a literary movie star “most intently related” with Heller’s novel “among the many variety of people that take into consideration such issues,” Gottlieb wrote in his memoir.
“However within the years that adopted its publication, I roughly put it out of my thoughts,” he added. “I actually by no means re-read it. I used to be afraid I would not find it irresistible as a lot as I as soon as had.”
His profession was (principally) marked by wild success
Success solely accelerated his drive. He signed up such rising authors as Edna O’Brien, Mordecai Richler and Len Deighton and was hip sufficient to amass John Lennon’s assortment of verse, vignettes and drawings, “In His Personal Write.” He later labored with Bob Dylan on a e book of his lyrics and was amazed to search out that “this genius insurgent and famous person was nearly childlike — you felt he barely knew the best way to tie his footwear, not to mention write a verify.”
Gottlieb had some letdowns, rejecting Larry McMurtry’s “Lonesome Dove” and battling John Kennedy Toole’s “A Confederacy of Dunces.” Toole submitted the novel within the early Sixties to a optimistic response from Gottlieb, who additionally prompt quite a few revisions. For 2 years, Toole stored making modifications and Gottlieb stored asking for extra, telling the creator that “there should be a degree to every part within the e book, an actual level, not simply amusingness that is compelled to determine itself out.”
Gottlieb lastly gave up, and Toole ultimately killed himself, in 1969. A decade later, his mom helped get “Confederacy” printed by Louisiana State College to public acclaim, the Pulitzer Prize and lasting affection, the form of destiny Gottlieb’s different authors typically loved.
Gottlieb’s different successes — he had so many — included Charles Portis’ “True Grit,” Potok’s “The Chosen” and a Pulitzer Prize-winning anthology of John Cheever’s quick tales, compiled by Gottlieb over the creator’s misgivings. At The New Yorker, which he edited from 1987-1992, Gottlieb printed quick fiction by Denis Johnson that later grew to become the acclaimed “Jesus’ Son.”
He was in any other case identified for introducing a extra casual model to the venerable journal — together with a willingness to let the occasional four-letter phrase seem in print.
An acknowledged workaholic, Gottlieb was additionally essentially the most private of editors. When Ephron’s marriage to Carl Bernstein broke up, she and her youngsters stayed for just a few months with Gottlieb. He not solely referred to as male writers “pricey boy,” however eyed each line of such marathons as “The Energy Dealer,” for which Gottlieb and Caro spent a number of contentious weeks — facet by facet — reducing some 300,000 phrases from a manuscript that initially topped 1 million and nonetheless ended up at greater than 1,200 pages. They may argue fiercely over the utilization of semicolons (Caro favored them; Gottlieb didn’t) however agreed on Caro’s ambition to put in writing a definitive account of the imperious municipal builder Robert Moses.
“You do not tackle books with which you wouldn’t have a sympathy,” Gottlieb advised The Guardian in 2016. “Solely hassle can come up if as an alternative of eager to make a e book that you simply like even higher than it’s, you wish to change it into one thing that it is not.”
Gottlieb was equally exacting after signing up a younger medical pupil named Michael Crichton and his novel, “The Andromeda Pressure.” He beloved Crichton’s story of a lethal virus, however wished extra plot and factual particulars and fewer character improvement.
“He would name me up and say, ‘Pricey boy! I’ve learn your manuscript, and here’s what you must do,'” Crichton advised The Paris Assessment in 1994. “And he was not above saying, ‘I do not know if you are able to do it this fashion, I do not know when you’re as much as it, which after all would drive me right into a fury of effort.’ It was very efficient.”
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