“When there was work to be done, Mr. Perkins could convince you you were the only person in the world to do it.”

More a friend to his authors than a taskmaster, he aided them in every way. He helped them structure their books, if help was needed; thought up titles, invented plots; he served as psychoanalyst, lovelorn adviser, marriage counselor, career manager, money-lender. Few editors before him had done so much work on manuscripts, yet he was always faithf

he had offended the daily critics in the book by referring to the New York crowd as “angleworms in a bottle” and to critics as the lice that crawl on literature;

batter,”

He often spoke of “dear old Adolf” and his SS, who knew what to do with thugs who picked on artists. America was the place, he said, “where honest men were all robbed and bludgeoned by scoundrels.”

During the spring of 1936 Hemingway had resumed his bullying of Scott Fitzgerald.

He warned the students against any effort by an editor to inject his own point of view into a writer’s work or to try to make him something other than what he is.

Another Brownell adage that Perkins subscribed to was that the worst reason for publishing anything was that it resembled something else, that however unconscious, “an imitation is always inferior.”

“Do not try to make the brilliant pupil a replica of yourself,” Gilbert Highet wrote in The Art of Teaching. “If you can send him into the world with frames of reference suggested by you and tricks of craftsmanship which he could get only from you, you will have made him your pupil, as much as he will ever be, and earned a right to his permanent gr