Max Perkins: Editor of Genius

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

Without being a writer himself, he could speak the language of writers better than any editor or publisher” one would ever meet.

Scott Fitzgerald had become a rival whom Hemingway would thereafter pit himself against.

Ernest Hemingway said the book was “something over 60% shit.”

Wolfe now moved into a new apartment at 865 First Avenue, just two blocks toward the East River from the Perkinses’ house.

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

“Crack-Up”

Mark Twain’s sentiment in “The Two Testaments”—that “when man could endure life no longer, death came and set him free”—seemed

The conference between Maxwell Perkins and old Charles Scribner, when they met face-to-face, over the unprintable words in Hemingway’s manuscript has become publishing legend.

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.