Customer Reviews

Max and Marjorie: The Correspondence between Maxwell E. Perkins and Marjorie Kinnan Rawl

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This is a breathtaking book . . . I felt like I was in the room with Marjorie as she wrote each letter to Max Perkins. She is engaging, perceptive, very charming and brutally honest by turns. Max Perkins knew how to motivate Marjorie toward her best work through compliments and gentle reminders. When Max dies, it is hearbreaking, because the book is over, and I wanted it to continue on.

I had chills when Perkins wrote Rawlings, "I see you book as a story about a boy growing up in the scrub...." and the Yearling was born from America's greatest editor to one of his authors that he understood as only he could.Reading his letters to her is to know American fiction first hand, from the genius's workshop gently passed on to a brilliant pupil. I have nothing but praise for the collector for bringing this to us.

Max Perkins was the emperor of editors. I'm an editor myself (of textbooks), and Editor to Author, a collection of Perkins's letters to many of his writers, taught me how to deal with authors in order to get the best out of them. Two things about Max and Marjorie especially struck me. One was the difference between then and now in speed of communication. We'd never have these wonderful letters if Max and Marjorie had been using email or the telephone. The other was the insensitive attitude toward blacks. These were two educated and sensitive people. They didn't even realize what they were doing or saying. It seems horrible now.

I have worked on textbooks in which the writing process is a prominent feature in teaching students, and it is made to sound deadly dull, but the writing process makes a fascinating subject when it's discussed by Max and Marjorie.

I gave up a night's sleep because I did not want to put this book down.

The letters of Max Perkins and Marjorie Rawlings reveal Perkins genius as an editor more than any
genius of Rawlings as an author. Perkins always knew what to say and when to say it. Rawlings didn't.
She did have a topic, however, that was great interest to Perkins, the poverty stricken people of the
Florida scrub. After guiding Rawlings in her vastly underrated and largely forgotten first novel, SOUTH
MOON UNDER, Perkins continually urged her to write what would become THE YEARLING. It was his idea to
write a Huck Finn novel out of the scrub, and eventually Rawlings agreed. Still, it was her giftedness
with language that made THE YEARLING both the cultural phenomena that it was.

Since I read A. Scott Berg's excellent biography of Maxwell Perkins, I have been "hooked" on books about this (to me) wonderful person, who edited, assisted, cajoled, and nurtured such talents as Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Thomas Wolfe, Ring Lardner, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, and Taylor Caldwell, along with so many others.

The letters exchanged between Max Perkins and Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, roughly 17 years worth, are simply an incredible treasure trove: a mixture of writing advice; business matters (including Ms. Rawlings's trial for 'invasion of privacy', brought after publication of her book Cross Creek); discussions of other Scribners authors; expressions of friendship and deep affection. Perkins, aside from being a gentleman and an editor of discernment, was probably the best friend Ms. Rawlings ever had.

I recommend this book highly, and also recommend The Sons of Maxwell Perkins: Letters of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Thomas Wolfe And Their Editor (ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli & Judith S. Baughman).