Legendary Literary Editor Robert Gottlieb Passes Away at 92 – You Won’t Believe His Incredible Journey!

Gottlieb died of natural causes in a New York City hospital on Wednesday, announced the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Caro, who had worked with Gottlieb on his project for decades Lyndon Johnson Biographies and was featured with him last year the documentary “Turn Every Page” said in a statement that he had never worked with an editor who was so attuned to the writing process.

“From the day 52 years ago that we first looked at my pages together, Bob understood what I was trying to do and allowed me to take the time and do the work I needed to do,” Caro said in an interview statement. “People talk to me about some of the triumphant moments that Bob and I shared, but today I remember other moments, difficult ones, and I remember how Bob was always, always there for me for half a century. He was a great friend and today I mourn him with all my heart.”

Gottlieb was tall and confident, with wavy dark hair and dark-framed glasses. He had one of the greatest successes of any editor after the Second World War and helped shape the canon of modern publishing. His credits included fiction by Future Nobel laureate Morrison,Doris Lessing And VS Naipaul; spy novels by John le Carre, essays by Nora Ephron, Science thriller by Michael Crichton And Caro’s non-fiction epics. He also edited memoirs by Katharine Hepburn, Lauren Bacall and editor of the Washington Post Catherine Graham, whose “Personal History” won a Pulitzer Prize. Gottlieb so impressed Bill Clinton that the former president signed a contract with Alfred A. Knopf, in part for a chance to work with Gottlieb his memoirs “My Life”.

Uniquely well-read and clumsy, he was one of those rare souls who would claim to have completed “War and Peace” in a single weekend (some accounts have been limited to a single day) and also collected plastic handbags that line the shelves above his bed filled. Gottlieb was as receptive to Miss Piggy’s Guide to Life as he was to the works of Chaim Potok. For decades he had a bronze paperweight on his desk, a gift he received when he started publishing, with the words “GIVE THE READER A BREAK” engraved on it.

He gained Gottlieb’s reputation during his time as Editor-in-Chief of Simon & Schuster and later Alfred A Button, where he has worked as editor-in-chief for the last few years. He also edited The New Yorker for five years before parting ways with publisher SI Newhouse over “conceptual differences,” and was an accomplished prose stylist himself. He wrote dance reviews for The New York Observer and book reviews for The New York Times. He wrote a short biography about george balanchine, Co-author of A Specific Style: The Art of the Plastic Handbag, 1949-59 and editor of respected anthologies of 20th-century jazz criticism and song lyrics. His memoirs Avid Reader were published in 2016.

He was married twice, the second time actress Maria Tucci, and had three children. Otherwise he was so engrossed in the work that he looked at early proofs of one Cynthia Ozick book while counting his pregnant wife’s labor pains – that author Thomas Mallon summed up his life as “busman’s vacation with no brakes”.

In Turn Every Page, a collaborative biography by Caro and Gottlieb directed by the editor’s daughter, Lizzie Gottlieb, Robert Gottlieb described editing as a “service job.” He recalled that the books he brooded over were not his own and that maintaining the ideal editor-author relationship was “an equal force” in which each shared their best talents.

“I’m not egoless,” he confessed to his daughter.

caro is is still writing his fifth and probably last volume the Johnson biographies, a series that began almost 50 years ago. A spokesman for Knopf Doubleday did not comment on who might serve as editor.

Born and raised in Manhattan, Gottlieb would say he was born with “extra drive.” He was a lifelong bookworm who would recall pulling out as many as four novels a day from his local public library. As a teenager, he would visit the Columbia University library, looking for old copies of Publishers Weekly and studying the bestseller lists.

Eventually, he attended Columbia University, graduating in 1952. After studying in England at Cambridge University for two years and briefly working in theatre, Gottlieb joined Simon & Schuster in 1955 as an editorial assistant, an upstart who claimed he took the job to support his wife and child, but also so self-confident that even then he considered himself “a better reader than everyone else,” he recalled in the documentary.

In the memoir Another Life, Michael Korda, co-editor of Simon & Schuster, described the young Gottlieb as “one of those penniless perpetual students of Russian novels” whose glasses were so smeared that Korda was amazed he could see anything. Through the unwiped lenses, Korda noticed eyes that were “sharp and intense, but with a certain kindly, humorous sparkle.”

Within two years he had hired a former World War II pilot named Joseph Heller and his partially written novel about the war entitled Catch-18. As Heller later recalled, he wanted an open mind to deal with his shocking satire, and his agent had told him that Gottlieb was known for being “open to innovation”. Gottlieb convinced skeptical executives at Simon & Schuster to give the novel a shot.

“The funny parts are hilarious, the serious parts are excellent,” he told the editor.

Gottlieb paid $1,500 for the novel, $750 when Heller signed it, and $750 after publication. He also made some “general suggestions,” including changing the title to “Catch-22” to avoid confusion Leon Uris’ “Mila 18.” The book was published in 1961 and initially met with a mild response. After it was recommended to a New York Herald Tribune critic by another Gottlieb author, humorist SJ Perelman, it was well received. “Catch-22” would eventually become a blockbuster and counterculture touchstone, and Gottlieb would become a literary celebrity who was “most closely associated with him.” with Heller’s novel “Among the people who think about such things,” Gottlieb wrote in his memoirs.

“But in the years since it was released, I’ve pretty much banished it from my memory,” he added. “I certainly never read it again. I was afraid I wouldn’t enjoy it as much as I used to.”

Success only quickened his drive. He has signed such aspiring writers as Edna O’Brien,Mordecai Richler and Len Deighton and was hip enough to buy it John Lennon’s Collection of poems, vignettes and drawings, “In his own writing.” He later worked with Bob Dylan on a book of his lyrics and was amazed that “this genius rebel-superstar was almost childlike — you got the feeling he barely knew how to tie his shoelaces, let alone how to write a check.”

Gottlieb had some disappointments and declined Larry McMurtrys “Lonesome Dove” and the fight with John Kennedy Toole’s “A Confederacy of Dunces”. Toole submitted the novel in the early 1960s and received a positive response from Gottlieb, who also suggested numerous revisions. For two years, Toole kept making changes, and Gottlieb kept asking for more, telling the author that “everything in the book has to have meaning, real meaning, not just amusing stuff that has to figure itself out.”

Gottlieb eventually gave up and Toole eventually took his own life in 1969. A decade later, his mother helped bring public acclaim to Confederacy, published by Louisiana State University. the Pulitzer Prize and enduring affection, the kind of fate Gottlieb’s other authors often enjoyed.

Gottlieb’s other achievements – he had so many – included: Charles Portis’ True Grit, Potok’s The Chosen, and a Pulitzer Prize-winning anthology of John Cheever’s short stories compiled by Gottlieb in response to the author’s concerns. Gottlieb published short stories for the New Yorker, which he edited from 1987 to 1992 by Dennis Johnson this later became the celebrated “Son of Jesus”.

Otherwise, he was known for bringing a more informal style to the venerable magazine—including a willingness to occasionally have a four-letter word appear in print.

Gottlieb was a recognized workaholic and at the same time the most personal editor. At Ephron’s wedding to Carl Bernstein When she separated, she and her children stayed with Gottlieb for a few months. Not only did he call male writers “dear boy,” he scrutinized every line of such marathons as “The Power Broker” To do this, Gottlieb and Caro spent several contentious weeks working side-by-side to excise about 300,000 words from a manuscript that originally ran at over a million pages and still ended up at over 1,200 pages. They may have argued vigorously about the use of semicolons (Caro preferred them, Gottlieb did not), but agreed with Caro’s goal of writing a definitive account of the rulers City architect Robert Moses.

“You don’t take on books you don’t feel sympathy for,” Gottlieb told The Guardian in 2016. “There can only be trouble if you want to make a book that you like even better than it is. Turn it into something it’s not.”

Gottlieb was just as demanding after he hired a young medical student named Michael Crichton for his novel ” “The Andromeda tribe.” He loved Crichton’s story about a deadly virus, but wanted more plot and factual detail and less character development.

“He called me and said, ‘Dear boy! I’ve read your manuscript and here’s what you need to do,'” Crichton told The Paris Review in 1994. “I don’t know if you’re capable of that, which of course would drive me insane.” It was very effective.”