Maxwell Perkins

Maxwell Perkins is the reason a great deal of American literature exists in the form it does. He worked for one publishing house for thirty-seven years, published almost nothing under his own name, and is the only book editor most readers can name. Between 1919 and his death in 1947 he signed or edited F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Thomas Wolfe, Ring Lardner, Erskine Caldwell, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, and Martha Gellhorn. Four of those names carried the decade these pages begin with.

He was born William Maxwell Evarts Perkins in New York City on 20 September 1884, a grandson of William M. Evarts, who had defended Andrew Johnson at his impeachment trial and served as Secretary of State. He went to St. Paul's School in Concord, New Hampshire, then to Harvard, graduating in 1907 — an economics major who spent his time on literature, studying under Charles Townsend Copeland. He joined Charles Scribner's Sons in 1910 as an advertising manager, married Louise Saunders the same year, and moved to the editorial staff in 1914. They had five daughters. He commuted from Connecticut, wore a hat indoors, and was, by every account, almost pathologically reticent.

His first fight was the one that made him. In 1919 he took on a rejected manuscript by an unknown twenty-two-year-old and pushed it past Scribner's older men, who did not want it. The book was This Side of Paradise, it appeared in 1920, and it made F. Scott Fitzgerald famous within a week. Perkins edited everything Fitzgerald wrote after that, including The Great Gatsby in 1925, whose shape owes a great deal to his letters — he read the draft, told Fitzgerald that Gatsby himself was vague, and got a rewrite that fixed it.

Fitzgerald then did him the largest favour of his career. In the autumn of 1924 he wrote to Perkins about a young American in Paris he had not yet met, misspelling the name with two m's, and urged him to look him up. The pursuit of Ernest Hemingway took two years and was settled by a stunt: Hemingway owed Boni & Liveright a book, wrote The Torrents of Spring as a parody of their own star author, and they refused it exactly as intended. The contract dissolved, and Perkins got both the parody and The Sun Also Rises in 1926. The two men wrote to each other for twenty-two years; the correspondence is published whole as The Only Thing That Counts.

Hemingway cost him a particular kind of trouble, because Perkins had to carry the obscenity arguments to Charles Scribner himself. There is a story, and it is worth labelling as one, that on reading The Sun Also Rises he jotted the offending words on his desk calendar under Things To Do Today, and that Scribner walked in, read the list, and told him he must be exhausted. It is repeated as a fanciful tale rather than as documented fact, and the detail that makes it plausible is real enough: Perkins did not swear. His strongest recorded expression was "My God," and he did not use it often. The fights themselves were real too, and he had them again over A Farewell to Arms in 1929, much of which reached print with dashes where the words had been.

The third of the great relationships was the hardest. Thomas Wolfe delivered a manuscript called O Lost that ran past a thousand pages, and Perkins cut it into Look Homeward, Angel, published in 1929. The second book, longer still, he cut into Of Time and the River in 1935. Wolfe was grateful and then he was not. In 1936 the critic Bernard DeVoto wrote in the Saturday Review that the novels had been hacked into shape by Perkins and the Scribner assembly line, which was the accusation Wolfe most feared, and he left for Harper & Brothers to prove he could do it alone. He died of miliary tuberculosis in 1938, at thirty-seven. The last letter he wrote, from his sickbed before he lost consciousness, was to Perkins.

He kept working through the 1940s. He published Martha Gellhorn's first collection of short fiction, The Heart of Another, in 1941, and he approached a young veteran named James Jones in 1945 about a novel that became From Here to Eternity. In 1947 an unsolicited typescript arrived from South Africa by way of two readers in California, and Perkins accepted it at once. Alan Paton's Cry, the Beloved Country was published on 1 February 1948 and became a worldwide book; its editor never saw it. He had been taken to hospital in Stamford with a fever on 2 June 1947 and died there of pneumonia on 17 June, at sixty-two, as Scribner's editorial director and a vice president of the firm.

The profession he effectively invented has kept his name because he wrote so much of himself into letters. A. Scott Berg's Max Perkins: Editor of Genius, which won the National Book Award in 1978, was built from that correspondence, and it is the reason a book editor is a figure the public can picture at all. What the letters mostly show is not brilliance but patience — a man telling Fitzgerald that a character had not come clear, telling Hemingway which words would survive the front office, and telling Wolfe, at enormous length, what could go.