Maxwell Perkins—Editor of a Galaxy of Literary Stars

Super editor Maxwell Perkins.
 

In American letters there have been figures who nurtured the writers who became the voices of their generations.  There was the Sage of Concord, Ralph Waldo Emerson himself and his circle of acolytes and admirers.  William Dean Howells presided at The Atlantic and hobnobbed with Mark Twain and fostered the realist novelists who lifted the genre from genteel diversions for ladies and epic adventure yarns to a mirror of American life.  Ezra Pound in London and Paris and Harriet Monroe in Chicago nurtured a brood of modern poets.  These folks were writers themselves who mentored and encouraged other writers, most often through periodicals that they edited or controlled.

But the man who revolutionized the American novel and made it the preeminent literary force of the first half of the 20th Century was not himself a writer.  He held a previously obscure position—manuscript editor for a publishing house—and transformed it into a discoverer of new talent and an active partner with authors in shaping their books for the public eye.  In the process he became the most famous editor of all time—Maxwell Perkins.

Perkins was born into the perfectly respectable WASP upper middle class on September 20, 1884, in New York City but was raised in the leafy bedroom suburb of Plainfield, New Jersey, a place of large homes and expansive lawns.  His parents could afford to send him to a prestigious prep school, St. Paul’s in Concord, New Hampshire and on to Harvard where he studied economics in preparation for an expected career in banking or a brokerage house.

But at Harvard Perkins fell under the sway of Charles Townsend Copeland, a famous teacher of literature who ignited a passion for reading.

Upon graduation Perkins worked briefly as a reporter on the New York Times perhaps dreaming that it might be a stepping stone for a career as a writer.  But it was not a good fit.  In 1910 at age 26 he joined the distinguished—and stuffy—publishing house of Charles Scribner’s Sons as an advertising manager.  Scribner’s was the home of genteel giants of American fiction—Edith Warton, Henry James, and John Galsworthy who chronicled the lives of the American elite.

It took Perkins four years to reach his goal—moving to the editorial department where he became a manuscript reader and junior editor.  It was here that his talents shone, particularly what came to be described as his exquisite taste and his eagerness to discover new talent that would break the bonds of convention.  That did not always make him popular with his superiors, but he shepherded enough good work to profitable publication that he could keep his job.

                    F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Perkins’s breakthrough came in 1919 when a manuscript landed on his desk that had been rejected with scathing comments by all of the company’s other readers.  The Romantic Egotist by a very young writer named F. Scott Fitzgerald was indeed rough.  But Perkins discerned talent.  For nearly two years he worked closely with the writer, guiding him through two complete revisions while continually advocating for the book with his bosses.

His approach would set a pattern.  He became not just a proof reader and style critic, but a friend and mentor to the young author, encouraging him, listening to his self-doubts, advising him on his tempestuous romance with a wealthy belle named Zelda, lending him money, and when necessary sobering him up.  Much later Roger Burlingame, a writer who came under his tutelage described Perkins’s unique approach, “He never tells you what to do.  Instead, he suggests to you, in an extraordinarily inarticulate fashion, what you want to do yourself.”

Despite all of his work, it looked like Scribner’s would finally reject the book.  At a last, desperate conference, Perkins appealed to the company’s sense of self-preservation, warning that if a talented writer like Fitzgerald was lost to them, he would find a publisher elsewhere, have a great success, and other promising young writers would follow him, “Then we might as well go out of business.”

Scribner’s held its own and published the re-titled This Side of Paradise was published in 1920 with the boast that the author was the youngest ever issued by the house. It became a best seller, a popular sensation, and the company’s biggest seller of the year.

Perkins continued to work with his wunderkind, bringing to publication the even bigger success of the Great Gatsby and then holding his hand through years of writer’s block, self-doubt, and heavy drinking, extracting from the wreckage what he could.  They remained personally and professionally close right up to the writer’s death.

                Ernest Hemingway.

Fitzgerald helped Perkins find his next discovery, when he wrote from Paris in 1924 recommending his friend and drinking companion Ernest Hemingway. The short novel the expatriate writer sent to New York with its terse language and shocking themes, required less editorial tinkering than Fitzgerald’s but did take a lot of cajoling to get his bosses, who were shocked by the use of curse words and sexual tension, to get the company to release A Sun Also Rises. 

Hemingway also became a close friend to his editor—and often had him attend to various business aspects of his sometimes messy life in addition to work on his manuscripts, even seeking his help in securing his house in Key West.  It was said that the first person Hemingway visited each time he was in New York was Maxwell Perkins.  After Perkins died his old friend dedicated The Old Man and the Sea to him—just one of 68 books dedicated to him by grateful authors. 

Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Perkins together remade the image of Scribner’s elevating it to undisputed first position among major American publishing houses.  And they were just getting started.

In 1927 Perkins came upon the greatest challenge of his career—the wildly talented and prolific Thomas Wolfe who presented him with thousands of typewritten manuscript pages.  Wolfe was everything Hemmingway was not—lush in his language, devoted to detailed and evocative description of scene and place, sprawling, undisciplined, and deeply emotionally attached to every sentence he wrote.

                        Thomas Wolfe.        

Together, with Wolfe fighting him every inch of the way, the two extracted a long memoir novel, Look Homeward Angel from the original submission.  The book was published in 1929 to huge popular and critical acclaim.  And there was more than enough material left over to seed a second novel.  As Perkins struggled to keep a limit on the new book, Wolfe kept sending him more and more new pages.  Eventually the editor prevailed and Of Time and the River was published in 1935.

By that time Perkins was a publishing legend and probably the only book editor who was a public figure in his own right.  The epic struggles of getting Wolfe’s latest book to publication had become the stuff of New York literary circle gossip and critics were beginning to give Perkins as much credit for the book as the author.  It was a bitter pill for any writer, particularly one as insecure as Wolfe.  He broke with Perkins and Scribner’s to prove that he could do without them.  Wolfe’s next two novels, The Web and the Rock and You Can’t Go Home Again were published posthumously.  They were fine work, but Perkins’s disciplined hand was obviously missing.

Despite the rupture of their professional relationship, Perkins and Wolfe remained personally close.  Wolfe, descending deeper into alcoholism, still considered his old editor his best friend. 

Taken together those three literary giants have come to define Perkins in the public mind.  And they would be a sufficient career achievement for anyone.  But the editor discovered, nurtured, and refined the works of many others.  In fact the list is staggering.

Take Ring Lardner.  He was already a popular sports writer whose baseball yarns had a fallowing.  But previous collections of columns had failed and Lardner did not consider himself a serious or literary writer.  Perkins urged him to rework his stories and arranged them.  Then he came up with an intriguing title that virtually announced confidence, How to Write Short Stories.  The collection was published in 1924 and cemented Lardner’s reputation.

In 1938 Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings wrote the Pulitzer Prize winning The Yearling based on a story idea suggested by Perkins.  In the post war years he discovered the South African novelist Alan Paton and Cry the Beloved Country became an international sensation.

            The mature legend at work at Scribner's.            

In the late 40’s with his health failing, Perkins continued to turn up new talent.  He uncovered James Jones, one of the first important novelists of the World War II generation.  Rejecting his first submission, Perkins suggested the idea for From Here to Eternity based on his conversations with the author.  He worked on the early drafts of the manuscript but died before its publication and huge success.

The fruit of his final discovery did not ripen for nearly 20 years.  He signed Marguerite Young to a publishing contract in 1947 on the basis of a 40 page extract.  She did not finish her massive novel, Miss MacIntosh, My Darling until 1964 when it was published to huge critical acclaim.

Other writers Perkins edited include Sherwood Anderson, Erskine Caldwell, Taylor Caldwell, Marcia Davenport, Martha Gellhorn, J. P. Marquand, and Edmund Wilson.

Perkins died on June 17, 1947 in Stamford, Connecticut.  Scribner’s was never the same without him.

In 1978 Max Perkins: Editor of Genius by A. Scott Berg became a best seller and made Perkins, the publishing industry legend, something of a popular hero.  Other appreciations have been published since as well as several volumes of his correspondence including books dedicated to the letters to and from Fitzgerald and Hemingway. 

Colin Firth as Perkins and Jude Law as Wolfe in Genius.

In 2016 the film Genius focused on the relationship of Perkins and Wolfe with Colin Firth as the editor and Jude Law as the tortured writer.  It also featured Nichole Kidman as Wolfe’s lover Aline Bernstein and Laura Linley as Perkins’ wife.  Although well reviewed, the cerebral film sank in the multiplexes where superheroes and sci-fi epics dominated the screens.

Mark Twain—Greatest American Writer Period. End of Argument

Note:  This first appeared in this blog in a slightly different form on November 30, 2010 and again last year.  Just can’t get enough of Mark Twain…

Samuel Langhorne Clemens was born on November 30, 1835 in the insignificant village of Florida, Missouri shortly after the memorable appearance of Haley’s Comet.  His family soon moved to the very significant and bustling river port of Hannibal where he grew to be a lad of a more than standard issue impulse to mischief and a disdain for authority.  He vastly preferred idling along the river front to school work, but was quick and clever with words.  After his father died, his family sent him to apprentice at the age of 15 to the Hannibal Journal, a newspaper owned by his older brother Orion. He graduated from printer’s devil to typesetter and occasionally contributed unaccredited comic sketches to the paper. 

By the time he was 18 he itched to get out from under his family’s thumb and headed east where he easily found work as a type setter in New York City, Philadelphia, Cincinnati, and St. Louis.  In his spare time he haunted libraries and educated himself.  Returning home in 1857 he fell in with legendary Mississippi River Pilot Horace Bixby on a trip to New Orleans and studied with him for two years until he earned his pilot’s license. For almost two years he plied the river earning a princely salary of more than $250 a month and the prestige of the most important job on the river.  

When the Civil War closed the river, the young man briefly joined his Hannibal friends in a company of Confederate Volunteers.  Without hearing a shot fired Clemens quickly determined that the boring drudgery of a soldier’s life was not for him.  When his brother Orion secured appointment as secretary to the Republican governor of Nevada territory, the two set out on an adventurous trip by stage coach to the west. 

Clemens tried his hand as a gold miner in Virginia City, but soon decided it was too much work.  He went back to newspaper work for the Territorial Enterprise.  His tendency toward scathing satire often got him in trouble and he often wrote under various pseudonyms, including one incorporating a term from depth sounding on the Mississippi, Mark Twain.  That one stuck.  But he soon had too many enemies with horsewhips and—worse—pistols and decamped for San Francisco in 1864.

In the City by the Bay, Clemens returned to reporting.  He also fell in with a lively literary crowd that included local color writers like Bret Harte and Artemus Ward as well a young poet, Ina Coolbrith.  Under their influence he submitted some of his sketches to Eastern publications.  When The Saturday Press in New York published his mining camp story, The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County in 1865 he found himself a national celebrity and much in demand.

In 1866 he took an assignment from the Sacramento Bee to visit the Sandwich Islands (Hawaii).  His accounts of that trip and his first ventures on the lecture stage recounting them, made him in demand as a travel writer.  In 1867 the San Francisco Alta California sponsored Twain, as he was now professionally known, on the Quaker City steamship tour of Europe, the Mediterranean and the Holy Land. 

That was a hell of a lot of living for a young man still in his early 30’s.  And Mark Twain used it all, every bit of it, beginning with Innocents Abroad; or, The New Pilgrim's Progress, his account of his European adventures, published in 1869.  It sold an astonishing 70,000 copies in the first year alone.  He followed it up in 1872 with Roughing It, yarns from his journey west, gold mining adventures, and Nevada newspaper days.

Between those two books Clemens met and fell in love with Olivia Langdon, the beautiful sister of a friend.  The Langdons of Elmira, New York were wealthy and socially well connected to a world of the Eastern liberal elite.  Despite their mutual adoration, Olivia spent much of her time trying to tame Clemens’s blaspheming tongue, cure him of his fondness for cigars, and make a decent Christian out of the admitted heretic.  

The couple spent a couple of years in Buffalo, New York where he edited and had an ownership stake in the Buffalo Express. After their first child and only son Langdon died of diphtheria at 19 months, Clemens sold his interest in the paper and with the earnings of his first two books built a handsome mansion for Olivia in Hartford, Connecticut.

The seventeen years spent in the Hartford house were the happiest and most productive of Clemens’s life.  His three daughters, Suzie, Clara, and Jean were all born there and doted on by their father.  His circle of friends widened and deepened from next door neighbor Julia Ward Howe to the editor and Christian socialist William Dean Howells.  He entertained and admired Fredrick Douglas and casually welcomed the increasing parade of fans, famous and ordinary, who made the pilgrimage to meet him.  Exposure to new ideas broadened him—and drove him further to the left politically with each passing year as he also became ever more disenchanted with smug Christianity.   He embraced full social equality for Blacks and other minorities, heartily endorsed women’s suffrage—and made one of the most widely circulated addresses by a man on the subject—and endorsed labor unions, gladly accepting an invitation to speak to the Knights of Labor.

The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today published was in 1872 shortly after settling into the new house.  It was Twain’s first foray into the novel and was written in collaboration with his neighbor Charles Dudley Warner. A satire on speculation and political corruption, the book was moderately successful and spawned a long running theatrical version featuring the blowhard promoter Colonel Beriah Sellers.  The book gave Twain the courage to try his hand at more novels.  

He turned to his own Hannibal childhood for the inspiration of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer in 1876, followed by his masterpiece, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn eight years later.  By that time Twain had matured as an artist and in addition to good fun and a rousing adventure yarn, Huck Finn, partly inspired by The Odyssey, included sharp barbs at slavery, social snobbery, mob mentality, and literary romanticism.

Among the books completed in Hartford were the novels which explored class, caste, and power—The Prince and the Pauper (1881) and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889.) The later was one of the first works of fiction to employ the notion of time travel and deserves to be considered a forerunner of modern speculative fiction. There was also more non-fiction—A Tramp Abroad based on a second trip to Europe in made in 1878 and published in 1880 and Life on the Mississippi, his 1883 look back at his time as a Mississippi River boat pilot.  There were also numerous newspaper articles and sketches as well as speeches and lectures.

Clemens was also trying his hand at business.  He started a publishing house with his nephew by marriage, Charles L. Webster & Company.  The publishing company got off to a good start when it issued the memoirs of Clemens’s friend, former President Ulysses S Grant.  Grant was dying of cancer of the jaw and out of kindness, Clemens paid him a huge advance to secure his family’s financial future.  Luckily it turned out that Grant was an exceptionally fine writer for a general and he book was a huge success.  Later projects, however, fared less well.  A biography of Pope Leo XIII sold fewer than two hundred copies ruining the company.

Clemens was also an enthusiast for new inventions and his investments in them led to disaster.  The worst was the Paige Typesetter, a promising new invention to speed up the tedious and expensive work of setting type by hand, as Clemens himself had so often done as a young man.  The invention worked tantalizingly well but was complicated and too prone to mechanical failure to be practical.  Clemens sank nearly $300,000 (equal to more than $7.5 million today) of his own money and Olivia’s inheritance on it between 1880 and 1894.  Then, just as it was about to be perfected the Linotype rendered it obsolete.

As his debts piled up, Twain wrote furiously.  He undertook any newspaper or magazine work offered and dashed of hasty, not fully conceived novels like Tom Sawyer, Detective and Puddin’ Head Wilson to try to bring in revenue.  He turned more and more to the lecture platform where he was in great demand.  His performances, mixtures of readings from his works and seemingly off-the-cuff observations were masterful monologues and would be the envy of any stand-up comic today.

None of it was enough.  Clemens’s close friend, a Standard Oil executive named Henry Huttleston Rogers stepped in and took over his finances.  He transferred all of his copyrights to Olivia to protect income from them from creditors then declared bankruptcy.  Roger personally managed the household finances with a thrifty eye on the bottom line while Clemens undertook a world girdling speaking tour to repay all of his creditors, even though the bankruptcy absolved him of his obligations to them.  The tour stretched from 1894 to 1900, but Clemens returned home with enough money to pay every one off and start again clean.

A series of personal tragedies stalked Clemens in the last years of the 19th and early years of the 20th Centuries.   The death of his beloved daughter Suzie of meningitis in 1896 was a huge blow from which he never fully recovered.  He battled increasing depression when Olivia passed in 1904.  In 1909 both his close friend Henry Rogers and daughter Jean died within months.  Only Clara remained.

The succession of deaths caused Clemens to re-examine religion.  He was already deeply skeptical, although for Olivia’s sake he had often tried to open his mind to Christianity.  Twain’s serious 1896 novel Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc, by the Sieur Louis de Conte explored a topic that had fascinated him for more than 40 years.  He based the 17 year old Joan on his own Suzie and examined her more as a revolutionary heroine than a mystical figure. He considered it his best work, but the public disagreed.  

After Suzie’s death he became increasingly bitter at the notion of a God that would allow such pain and suffering in the world.  Twain last novella The Mysterious Stranger told of the visits of Satan to earth over various periods in history.  He wrote three versions over several years, but declined to publish any of them out of respect to Olivia and Clara.  A version miss mashed from all three manuscripts was published in 1924.  Now considered a classic, it was every bit as controversial as his family had feared.

Another, even more bitter, look at Christianity, Letters to the Earth was considered so shocking that it was withheld from publication for fifty years after Twain’s death.  Other manuscripts, including the complete versions of his Autobiography were held up for 100 years.  A version of the Autobiography, which Twain dictated from his bed, was published in serialized form as Chapters of My Autobiography in the North American Review in 1906 and ’07.  It was published as a book in 1927.  But the massive transcriptions contained much more material, which Twain knew to be scandalous.

In 2010 the first of three volumes of the complete Autobiography was published and became an instant best seller, making Mark Twain the first writer to have original material published and attain that status in three different centuries.  As Twain predicted, it contains “shocking” material with more promised in the remaining two volumes to be released over the next two years.  Here is a sample: 

There is one notable thing about our Christianity: bad, bloody, merciless, money-grabbing, and predatory. The invention of hell measured by our Christianity of today, bad as it is, hypocritical as it is, empty and hollow as it is, neither the deity nor his son is a Christian, nor qualified for that moderately high place. Ours is a terrible religion. The fleets of the world could swim in spacious comfort in the innocent blood it has spilled.

If his views on religion had soured, his political views had become extremely radical.  The Spanish American War and the brutal suppression of the Philippine Rebellion were the last straws.  Twain declared himself an anti-colonialist.  He co-founded the American Anti-Imperialist League in 1901 and spent the last ten years of his life crusading for justice for the “colored races of the world.”  He penned pamphlets, lectured until his health gave out and was equally as scathing to European as American imperialism.  He grew to hate war.  In 1905 he submitted his caustic War Prayer to Harpers Magazine, normally eager to publish anything by the great writer, but they rejected it as unsuitable for their female readership.  Because of contractual obligations, Twain was barred from publishing it elsewhere.  It did not see the light of day until 1923.  It has since inspired anti-war protesters from the Vietnam War to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Clemens’s views were becoming revolutionary.  He commented on his evolving views when he told an interviewer, “When I finished Carlyle’s French Revolution in 1871, I was a Girondin; every time I have read it since, I have read it differently–being  influenced and changed, little by little, by life and environment ... and now I lay the book down once more, and recognize that I am a Sansculotte! – And not a pale, characterless Sansculotte, but a Marat!”

Despite his hatred of war and violence, he endorsed the abortive 1905 Russian revolution.  “I am said to be a revolutionist in my sympathies, by birth, by breeding and by principle. I am always on the side of the revolutionists, because there never was a revolution unless there were some oppressive and intolerable conditions against which to revolt.”

He passed many of these ideas on to one of his last protégés, the deaf/blind student Helen Keller with whom he spent many hours of conversation through her interpreter Anne Sullivan, after first meeting her in 1896.  He encouraged his friend Rodgers to pay her tuition at Radcliffe.  Keller owed her awakening to social justice and socialism to Clemens and Anne Sullivan earned the title Miracle Worker from him.

Sam Clemens and Mark Twain—the two personalities now so intertwined that it  was impossible to tell them apart—died as he predicted the day after Haley’s Comet reached the nearest point to Earth on its return in 1910.  He suffered a heart attack on April 21 at Redding, Connecticut.

And Twain’s legacy?  Just this: the best damn American writer ever.  Period.  No argument allowed.