“I am not egoless,” he acknowledged to his daughter.īorn and raised in Manhattan, Gottlieb would say he was born with “extra drive.” He was a lifelong bookworm who recalled taking out up to four novels a day from his local public library. In “Turn Every Page,” a joint biography of Caro and Gottlieb directed by the editor’s daughter, Lizzie Gottlieb, Robert Gottlieb referred to editing as “a service job.” He would remind himself that the books he pored over were not his own, while also maintaining the ideal editor-writer relationship was “an equivalence of strength,” in which each shared the best of their talents. He was otherwise so absorbed in work - he was looking over early proofs of a Cynthia Ozick book while counting contractions for his pregnant wife - that the author Thomas Mallon summed up his life as a “busman’s holiday without any brakes.” He was married twice, the second time to actor Maria Tucci, and had three children. His memoir, “Avid Reader,” came out in 2016. He wrote a short biography of George Balanchine, co-authored “A Certain Style: The Art of the Plastic Handbag, 1949-59,” and edited well-regarded anthologies of jazz criticism and 20th century song lyrics. He wrote dance criticism for The New York Observer and book reviews for The New York Times. Newhouse and was himself an accomplished prose stylist. But he also edited The New Yorker for five years before departing over “conceptual differences” with publisher S.I. Knopf, where in recent years he worked as an editor-at-large. His reputation was made during his time as editor-in-chief of Simon & Schuster and later Alfred A. Gottlieb was among the last working editors from the pre-corporate era of publishing. On his desk for decades was a bronze paperweight, given to him when he started in publishing, etched with the words “GIVE THE READER A BREAK.” He was as open to “Miss Piggy’s Guide to Life” as he was to the works of Chaim Potok.
Uniquely well-read and unstuffy, Gottlieb was the rare soul who would claim to have finished “War and Peace” in a single weekend (some reports narrowed it to a single day) and also collected plastic handbags that filled shelves above his bed. He was a great friend, and today I mourn my friend with all my heart.”
“People talk to me about some of the triumphant moments Bob and I shared, but today I remember other moments, tough ones, and I remember how Bob was always, always, for half a century, there for me. “From the day 52 years ago that we first looked at my pages together, Bob understood what I was trying to do and made it possible for me to take the time, and do the work, I needed to do,” Caro said in a statement. Caro, who had worked for decades with Gottlieb on his Lyndon Johnson biographies and was featured with him last year in the documentary “Turn Every Page,” said in a statement that he had never worked with an editor so attuned to the writing process. Gottlieb died Wednesday of natural causes at a New York hospital, Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group announced. NEW YORK (AP) - Robert Gottlieb, the inspired and eclectic literary editor whose brilliant career was launched with Joseph Heller’s “Catch-22” and continued for decades with such Pulitzer Prize-winning classics as Toni Morrison’s “Beloved” and Robert Caro’s “The Power Broker,” has died at age 92.
0 kommentar(er)
