Avid Reader: A Life

Robert Gottlieb

ກ.ຍ. 2016 · ຂາຍໂດຍ Farrar, Straus and Giroux

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Winner of the Anne M. Sperber Prize

A spirited and revealing memoir by the most celebrated editor of his time.

After editing The Columbia Review, staging plays at Cambridge, and a stint in the greeting-card department of Macy's, Robert Gottlieb stumbled into a job at Simon and Schuster. By the time he left to run Alfred A. Knopf a dozen years later, he was the editor in chief, having discovered and edited Catch-22 and The American Way of Death, among other bestsellers. At Knopf, Gottlieb edited an astonishing list of authors, including Toni Morrison, John Cheever, Doris Lessing, John le Carré, Michael Crichton, Lauren Bacall, Katharine Graham, Robert Caro, Nora Ephron, and Bill Clinton--not to mention Bruno Bettelheim and Miss Piggy. In Avid Reader, Gottlieb writes with wit and candor about succeeding William Shawn as the editor of The New Yorker, and the challenges and satisfactions of running America's preeminent magazine. Sixty years after joining Simon and Schuster, Gottlieb is still at it--editing, anthologizing, and, to his surprise, writing.

But this account of a life founded upon reading is about more than the arc of a singular career--one that also includes a lifelong involvement with the world of dance. It's about transcendent friendships and collaborations, "elective affinities" and family, psychoanalysis and Bakelite purses, the alchemical relationship between writer and editor, the glory days of publishing, and--always--the sheer exhilaration of work.

Photograph of Bob Gottlieb © by Jill Krementz

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Robert Gottlieb (1931 - 2023) was a legendary book editor and writer who shaped the modern literary canon. He was editor-in-chief of Simon and Schuster, the head of Alfred A. Knopf, and editor of The New Yorker. He contributed frequently to The New York Times Book Review, The New Yorker, and The New York Review of Books, and the New York Observer as dance critic. His books include Great Expectations: The Sons and Daughters of Charles Dickens, George Balanchine: The Ballet Maker, Sarah: The Life of Sarah Bernhardt, Avid Reader: A Life, and a collection of essays Near-Death Experiences . . . and Others. In 2015, he was presented with the Award for Distinguished Service to the Arts by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. A documentary film exploring his fifty-year relationship with the writer Robert Caro, Turn Every Page, was released in 2022.