![]() “Sometimes that produces a kind of precious, jeweled quality-a tightness, which I particularly wanted in ‘Sula.’ Then after I finished ‘Sula’ and was working on the third book, ‘ Song of Solomon,’ Bob said to me, ‘You can loosen, open up.’ It was as if he had said, ‘Be reckless in your imagination.’ ” “Writing my first two books, ‘ The Bluest Eye’ and ‘ Sula,’ I had the anxiety of a new writer who needs to make sure every sentence is exactly the right one,” she once said. Morrison met Gottlieb when she was an editor at Random House and, in her off-hours, crafting her earliest novels. Naipaul, and Salman Rushdie Mikhail Baryshnikov, Natalia Makarova, and Lincoln Kirstein Bob Dylan, John Lennon, and Paul Simon Lauren Bacall, Sidney Poitier, Elia Kazan, Katharine Hepburn, and Irene Selznick. Gottlieb had passions––among them literature, ballet, music, and the movies––and those passions were reflected in his long list of authors, which included John Cheever, Joseph Heller, John le Carré, Doris Lessing, Jessica Mitford, Toni Morrison, V. Caro was just one of hundreds of authors he ministered to. ![]() Gottlieb, who died on Wednesday, at the age of ninety-two, may have been the most important book editor of his time. ![]() When we finished the last page of the last book we worked on, ‘ Means of Ascent,’ he held up the manuscript for a moment and said, slowly, as if he didn’t want to say it, ‘Not bad.’ ” That was also true of my second book, ‘ The Path to Power,’ the first volume of the Johnson biography. In a Paris Review interview, Caro said, “In all the hours of working on ‘The Power Broker,’ Bob never said one nice thing to me-never a single complimentary word, either about the book as a whole or about a single portion of the book. There is a deep bond between them, a distinctly unsentimental partnership in which everything is about purpose, choices, and decisions, never sloppy praise or even encouragement. These two secular Talmudists are hunched over the page, sharing a pencil and arguing about matters of punctuation, syntax, rhythm, and clarity. It began with “ The Power Broker,” Caro’s biography of Robert Moses, which, to its author’s agony, Gottlieb trimmed by some three hundred and fifty thousand words.Īudiences at Film Forum thrilled to the climactic scene in which Caro and Gottlieb sit side by side in an antiseptic office, intently reviewing a manuscript page from Caro’s study of Lyndon Johnson. ![]() Their relationship-intense, wary, mysterious-lasted a half century. Knopf, and from 1987 to 1992 was the editor of The New Yorker. The film, “Turn Every Page,” starred the semicolon-deploying biographer Robert Caro and the semicolon-averse editor Robert Gottlieb, who for many years was the head honcho at Simon & Schuster and then at Alfred A. Early this year, Film Forum, the redoubtable revival house on West Houston Street, drew overflow crowds for a documentary about two elderly men squaring off over semicolons and commas. ![]()
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