Max Perkins: Editor of Genius

Marcia Davenport was in Prague finishing East Side, West Side, which she dedicated to Perkins.

He would honor Perkins five years later by dedicating The Old Man and the Sea to him.

If an author worried too much about plot, Max said, he might become “sort of muscle-bound,” whereas he must be flexible.

archives of Charles Scribner’s Sons, which are housed in the Princeton University Library.

Malcolm Cowley assisted me in three important ways: His New Yorker profile of Perkins, “Unshaken Friend,” published in 1944, was the most comprehensive account of Perkins’s life to date.

You can’t know a book until you come to the end of it, and then all the rest must be modified to fit that.

James Jones, who was living in Illinois and inching ahead with From Here to Eternity.

Max’s comments were effective almost subliminally; he had a way of gently tossing them out as one would pebbles into a pond, making rings of meaning which enlarged until they touched the author’s consciousness.

John Smith, U.S.A.” He went on to develop his view of himself in some detail: He is the man who doesn’t know much, nor thinks that he knows much. He starts out with certain ambitions but he gradually accumulates obligations as he goes along, and they continually increase. They begin with his inherited family, and grow with the family that results f