On June 14, local time, the famous American publisher Robert Gottlieb died in Manhattan, New York, at the age of 92. His wife, Maria Tucci, confirmed that he had died in hospital.
Robert Gottlieb
As a legendary publisher of the second half of the 20th century in the United States, Gottlieb edited novels by famous artists including John le Carré, Toni Morrison, John Cheever, Joseph Heller, Doris Lessing, and Haim Portoc; science fiction by Michael Clayton, Ray Bradbury; memoirs of former U.S. President Bill Clinton and former Washington Post publisher Catherine Graham; and works by Jessica Mitford and Anthony Burgess.
During Simon's 30 years at the publishing houses of Schuster and Knopf, Gottlieb turned hundreds of manuscripts into wildly popular books, many of which sold millions of copies, won awards and made the authors famous. His keen eye and exceptional skill earned him a loyal group of writers and made him president and editor-in-chief of the Knopf publishing house.
In 1987, Gottlieb was named the third editor-in-chief in the history of The New Yorker, leaving the relatively quiet book publishing industry to move into one of the most high-profile positions in American journalism. He took the place of William Sean, who had been the magazine's legendary editor for 35 years.
The appointment was like a bomb, and 154 writers, editors and others signed a petition to protest Sean's forced retirement. Sean's articles have made journalism history, launching a series of bestsellers, including Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem and Rachel Carson's Silent Spring.
The petition mentions Gottlieb's reputation for brilliance, but urges him to quit, saying insiders like Charles McGrath are best suited to the magazine's tradition (McGrath was the magazine's fiction editor and successor who later became editor of The New York Times Review of Books). But Gottlieb refused to quit. He plunged headlong into a chaotic world of weekly deadlines and strange editor-writer relationships, contrary to his long experience as a book publisher.
In his 2012 anthology, The Art of Making Magazines, he recalled: "At a publishing house, you do a strictly service job. Your job is to serve the book and the author. But it's different in The New Yorker, where he says, "You are a living god." You're not there to please writers, but writers go there to satisfy you because they want to be in magazines. ”
Gottlieb's predecessor, William Sean, wore a jacket and tie and was honored as "Mr. Sean". And Gottlieb was not as respected, serious as he was, he was an eccentric cheesy collector who loved plastic women's handbags, was an avid fan of classical ballet, and an eccentric Anglophile who called the writer "dear child".
He doesn't attend lunch at gossip magazines and prefers to eat hot dogs in Central Park or sandwiches at his desk. With a long face, heavy glasses, thinning hair, old sneakers, baggy pants and a crumpled polo shirt, he walked around the office like a homeless man, chatting with employees.
To allay the concerns of many New Yorker enthusiasts, he has done little, and mostly small, in five years. He accepted a number of new contributors, including journalist Raymond Bonner, essayist Judith Thurman and poet Diane Ackerman, as well as novels by Robert Stone and Richard Ford. But he didn't shorten the long articles that critics called lengthy and tedious, and gradually won the trust and affection of most of the staff.
In 1992, Vanity Fair's British editor, Tina Brown, replaced Gottlieb in an amicable handover. After leaving The New Yorker, Gottlieb promptly resumed his editorial job for Knopf magazine and became a dance critic for The New York Observer; He compiled anthologies of dance, jazz and lyrics, and wrote several books, including his 2016 memoir, Avid Reader: a Life, in which he talks about the pros and cons of a literary career.
"Some editors always feel guilty that they're not writers." He explained, "I can write well — anyone with an education can write well. But it's very, very hard, and I just don't like this kind of activity. And reading is like breathing. ”
"He wasn't just an editor, he was 'the editor,'" John le Carré once told The Times, "and I don't have an editor in any country who can match him, no one who compares to him." He notes that Gottlieb used a pencil No. 2 to mark the manuscript, often using hieroglyphs in the margins to indicate variation: wavy lines indicate that the language is too ornate, and ellipses or question marks advise authors to "think harder and try again."
Robert Gottlieb was born in Manhattan on April 29, 1931. His father was a lawyer and his mother was a teacher. He grew up on the Upper West Side and attended the School of Moral Culture.
As a sick, lonely, unfortunate child, he sought refuge in books. As a teenager, he said, he read Tolstoy's War and Peace in one day and Marcel Proust's magnum opus In Search of Lost Time in a week.
"After school, I would read three or four books a day for 16 hours at a time," he told The New York Times in 1980. "I wander around three lending libraries and one public library all day."
At Columbia University, he easily completed his literary studies and received his bachelor's degree in 1952. He received his postgraduate degree from the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom in 1954.
Gottlieb joined Simon & Schuster in 1955 as an assistant to editor Jack Goodman. After the death of his boss in 1957, he became a senior editor dealing with theater critic Walter Kerr and humorist S.J. Perelman. Perelman), as well as fiction and nonfiction. He became editor-in-chief in 1965.
While working, he was fascinated by a manuscript called Catch-18 by an advertising copywriter named Joseph Heller. The title was changed because Leon Uris was writing the novel Mila 18, which was published in 1961 as Catch-22.
A serious comedy-style anti-war novel, Catch-22 became an enduring bestseller. Memorable is its description of World War II pilots as "captives," a phrase that became part of the American lexicon: If they were crazy, they didn't have to fly any more missions, but seeking an exemption showed a legitimate concern for safety and a rational justification for the need to perform more missions.
Gottlieb joined Knov in 1968 as vice president and editor-in-chief. He edited Robert Caro's Pulitzer Prize-winning work, Robert Moses' biography, The Power Broker, cutting 400,000 words from a million-word manuscript, and the author was furious. Despite the brutal cuts, their collaboration lasted 50 years and in 2022 became the subject of the documentary Turn Every Page, directed by Gottlieb's daughter, Lizzie Gottlieb.
In a statement issued after Gottlieb's death, Carlo said: "I have never met a publisher or editor who knows better than he does what a writer wants to do and how to help him do it. ”
Documentary "Turning Every Page"
Gottlieb also edited Henry Beard's 1981 Miss Piggy's Guide to Life and Salman Rushdie's 1988 The Satanic Verses, which kept Rushdie under constant death threats.
Gottlieb became president of Knopf in 1973.
In addition to memoirs, Gottlieb wrote biographies of actress Sarah Bernhardt and choreographer George Balanchine, a book about the children of Charles Dickens, and published articles for the New York Review of Books and many other publications.
His later books also include Near-Death Experiences... Near-Death Experiences... and Others), a collection of essays written primarily for the New York Review of Books, and Garbo, a biography of a mysterious movie star. But he always saw himself as an editor — floating somewhere behind the scenes.
"The editor's relationship to a book should be intangible." In 1994, Gottlieb told the Paris Review, "The last thing anyone reading Jane Eyre, for example, wants to know is that I convinced Charlotte Brontë that the first Mrs. Rochester should be burned." ”