Max Perkins: Editor of Genius

when even great men like Lenin try to make over a whole society suddenly the end is almost sure to be bad, and that the right end, the natural one, will come from the efforts of innumerable people trying to do right.

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.

acquiescing in his ruin.”

Hemingway offered to modify the noun with “lousy” or “lesbian,” but if anyone was ever a bitch, he said it was Gertrude Stein.

For his evening reading he stuffed into his briefcase a narrative by an old hunter in the Southwest who had fought Apaches.

The day before she left, Hemingway tussled six hours and fifty minutes with a 514-pound tuna. When his Pilar cruised into harbor at 9:30 that night, the whole population of the island flocked to see his fish and hear his tale. “A fatuous old man with a new yacht and a young bride had arrived not long previously, announcing that tuna-fishing, of who

Hemingway wrote Perkins from Oak Park that his father had shot himself, leaving a wife, six children, and “damned little money.” His father was the parent Hemingway really cared about. From that day forward his relationship with Perkins deepened. Max became the solid, trustworthy older man in Hemingway’s turbulent life, someone to turn to and rely

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

Mozart was an artistic and financial success, and it was not long before Mrs. Davenport was writing a new book, a novel.