Authors and Editors

[#1]

Partnerships, struggles, and collaborations.

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What There Is to Say We Have Said: The Correspondence of Eudora Welty and William Maxwell

Edited by Suzanne Marrs

Eudora Welty, Pulitzer Prize-winning author in the Southern Gothic tradition. William Maxwell, visionary fiction editor at The New Yorker for forty years.  A half-century's worth of their letters, collected and edited by Welty's friend and biographer Suzanne Marrs, range between subjects profound and mundane (J. D. Salinger's legacy and Christmas decorations, for example). But what remains constant throughout is the generosity of spirit displayed by both and the unassailable friendship that grew out of their exchange.

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Lives and Letters

By Robert Gottlieb

In his years as Editor-in-Chief of Simon & Schuster, Alfred A. Knopf, and The New Yorker, Gottlieb built an enduring reputation as one of the century's most exacting and brilliant editors. But his copious talents as an essayist are no less impressive, as this delightful volume makes clear. As fascinated by a juicy scandal as he was by an artist's magnum opus, Gottlieb offers diversions for every reader. Writing for the Barnes & Nobel Review, Brooke Allen insists when it comes to his subjects, " Gottlieb is not just a critic or a scholar but an unabashed and passionate fan."

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Max Perkins: Editor of Genius

By A. Scott Berg

The authors he nurtured are household names--Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Wolfe--but few people know the story of the editor behind these literary lights, the incomparable Maxwell Perkins. This National Book Award-winning biography seeks to reclaim its subject from obscurity with a penetrating, scrupulously researched account of Perkins' time at Scribner. More than just an editor, he played psychiatrist and priest, father figure and friend to the volatile geniuses who he shepherded from inspiration to publication.

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Another Life: A Memoir of Other People

By Michael Korda

Mafia dons, Academy Award-winning actresses, literary legends or ex-Presidents: Korda's catalogue of the personalities he met while working as Simon & Schuster's Editor-in-Chief becomes in this memoir an occasion to create with novelistic sweep a portrait not merely of the publishing world, but of American celebrity at the height of the American Century. Robert Gottlieb called it "a book so diverting, so lively, and so well intentioned that it calls for a new classification: a Book of Fabulous Beasts."

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The Pale King

By David Foster Wallace

When David Foster Wallace committed suicide in September 2008, he left 250 pages of an unfinished manuscript neatly stacked in the center of his desk, as well as a jumble of handwritten notebooks, computer disks, and scraps of paper strewn about his office. It fell to his editor at Little, Brown, Michael Pietsch, to assemble and whittle all of this material into what would eventually become The Pale King. A herculean task under any circumstances, but one made infinitely more difficult by Wallace's uniquely discursive style and the rabid following of his fans. Which makes the accomplishment all the more heroic when one reads this engrossing, compelling, unfinished novel.