Customer Reviews

Editor to Author: The Letters of Maxwell E. Perkins

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This is one of my all-time favorite books and my absolutely favorite book of letters.

I'm a textbook editor myself, and I first read this book fairly early in my career. I learned from Perkins how to respond to authors in a helpful way that would soothe them and get them to do what I wanted. From that point of view, it was almost a textbook on how to get along with authors.

Besides that, the book was terrifically entertaining and interesting. Max Perkins was the literary intimate of almost every great American writer of the first half of the twentieth century: Thomas Wolfe, Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings (The Yearling), and many others.

Editor To Author, The Letters of Maxwell Perkins [1884-1947], John Wheelock, Ed.; Charles Scribner's Sons (1950)

Novelist Marcia Davenport's autobiography "Too Strong For Fantasy" (1967) led to a re-reading of Scott Berg's "Max Perkins, Editor of Genius" (1978).

Davenport's praise & Berg's prose prompted the purchase of "Editor to Author," the biography of Charles Scribner's Sons' head editor in the 1930s-40s.

I think it's a quiet masterpiece, despite the inescapable repetition endured by a reader.

Maxwell would tell Marcia something once. It had already been stated five times previously - to Fitzgerald & Wolfe & Rawlings & Hemingway & Insert The Name of Your Favorite Novelist Edited By Perkins Here (on the other hand, there are undoubtedly writers who must have things hammered home repeatedly before they get it. In this context, the unavoidable repetition of Maxwell's advice is an asset).

Another slight liability is Wheelock's oddly haphazard editing.

A more engaged editor would have informed the reader - following Thomas Wolfe's final letter to Max (August 12, 1938) - that Wolfe had then passed away & on what date (September 15, 1938). Wheelock ignored the matter.

You're not informed of Wolfe's demise until Perkins himself refers to it in a letter eleven months later (August 15, 1939). My guess is that while Perkins was thrilled to be Wolfe's editor, Wheelock - working alongside Perkins - probably regarded him as a royal pain in the ass, since Wolfe's humongous manuscripts by default increased Wheelock's workload.

Wheelock also passed on straightening out the occasional confusing sentence. Max's directions to the author of "The Book of My Youth" needed pruning:

"I think, therefore, that although this book is not chronological, is discursive (which is all to its advantage), it would be better in this instance not to anticipate the mother's death" (p. 172).

Nor did I get far with:

"We deeply sympathize, as individuals, with the development of better understanding among all groups, but we do not think that in this country there should be any groups, as was the intention of its Founders, & we deplore, as individuals, the development of group consciousness" (p. 303).

Notwithstanding, "Editor To Author" is a valuable history of some of America's best authors & their books, who lived & were published in an age before television & the internet hastened the transformation of billions of brains into vegetables.