There could be nothing so important as a book can be. – Maxwell Perkins
In all the arts, perhaps no collaboration is more underappreciated than that between a book’s author and its editor. Other than the rarely read acknowledgements page, you’re unlikely to connect an editor with the book you love or hate. Yet the editor often makes or breaks a book. One editor who is nearly as celebrated as the authors he worked with is Max Perkins.
Considered by many to be the best editor ever, Max Perkins (September 20, 1884 – June 17, 1947) was the guiding hand behind such literary luminaries as F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, James Jones, Ring Lardner, Erskine Caldwell, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, Alan Paton and Thomas Wolfe. Working for the highly esteemed publisher Charles Scribner’s Sons, Perkins respected his writers. He said, “I believe the writer… should always be the final judge. I have always held to that position and have sometimes seen books hurt thereby, but at least as often helped. The book belongs to the author.”
Perkins’ writing skills are evident in letters he exchanged with the authors he mentored, promoted and befriended. He advised them, “If you are not discouraged about your writing on a regular basis, you may not be trying hard enough. Any challenging pursuit will encounter frequent patches of frustration. Writing is nothing if not challenging.” Perkins’ special gift was his ability to see where an author needed to take his or her work and to illuminate a path the author had not seen.
Perkins was also a fierce advocate of untested talent, often fighting the bosses at Scribner’s on behalf of young, fledgling, sometimes controversial authors. Scribner’s rejected Fitzgerald’s first novel with the working title, The Romantic Egotist. Perkins worked with Fitzgerald to revise the manuscript, which was renamed This Side of Paradise. After much coaxing, he convinced Scribner’s to publish the best-selling novel in 1920, launching Fitzgerald’s remarkable literary career and a new literary generation.
Perkins’ visionary approach, along with an extraordinary ability to understand the intent of the authors he worked with, attracted writers. Rawlings’ Pulitzer Prize-winning The Yearling (1938) was born of suggestions from Perkins. Perkins guided Jones away from the novel he was working on and set him on the path to what would become From Here to Eternity (1951). With gratitude for their many collaborations, Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea (1952), was dedicated posthumously to Perkins’ memory.
In today’s literary marketplace, with traditional publishers appearing to be more interested in numbers than in letters, and with the incursion of self-publishing, how likely are we to see another editor of Max Perkins’ spirit, talent and vision?
The next time you read a book that moves, informs, enlightens or greatly entertains you, find out who the editor was. And say a quiet “thank you.”