Terry, John
Thalberg, Irving
They Shall Inherit the Laughter (Jones)
This Side of Paradise (Fitzgerald)
acceptance and publication of
out of print
Romantic Egotist and
young generation captured by
Thomas, Ned
Thomason, John William
Three Blue Suits (Bernstein)
Three Comrades (Remarque)
Three Stories and Ten Poems (Hemingway)
Through the Wheat (Boyd)
Tobacco Road (Caldwell)
To Have and Have Not (Hemingway)
background of
Perkins’s early suggestion of
Perkins’s views on
publication and reception of
Toklas, Alice B.
Tolstoi, Count Leo
Too Strong for Fantasy (Davenport)
Torrents of Spring, The (Hemingway)
Train, Arthur
transatlantic review
Trouble I’ve Seen, The (Gellhorn)
Turnbull, Andrew
Turnbull, Mrs. Bayard
Twain, Mark
Two Years Before the Mast (Dana)
Tyler, Poyntz
“Undefeated, The” (Hemingway)
Undertaker’s Garland, The (Bishop and Wilson)
“Unshaken Friend” (Cowley)—427
Unspeakable Gentleman, The (Marquand)
U.S.A. (Dos Passos)
“Valediction: Of His Name in the Window, A” (Donne)
Valley of Decision, The (Davenport)
Van Dine, S. S. See Wright, Willard Huntington
Van Doren, Carl
Van Doren, Mark
van Loon, Hendrik Willem
Van Vechten, Carl
“Varied Outlooks” (Max Perkins)
Vegetable, The (Fitzgerald)
“Very Late Spring, A” (Caldwell)
“Very Short Story, A” (Hemingway)
View from Pompey’s Head, The (Basso)
Viking Press
Virginian, The (Wister)
Vision of Spangler’s Paul, The (Wolfe)
Voelcker, Thea
Vogue
Volkening, Henry
War and Peace (Tolstoi)
Wardner, Helen Minerva
Warfield, Wallis
Warning Hill (Marquand)
Warren, Robert Penn
Washington, George
“Way You’ll Never Be, A” (Hemingway)
Web and the Rock, The (Wolfe)
autobiographical aspects of
Webb, Beatrice and Sidney
“Web of Earth, The” (Wolfe)
Wecter, Dixon
Weeks, Edward
Weinberger, Henry
Welbourne, Lemmon home in (Va.)
Wendell, Barrett
“Western Journey, A” (Wolfe)
Weston, Christine
Wharton, Edith
What of It? (Lardner)
What Price Glory? (Anderson and Stallings)
Wheaton, Mabel Wolfe
Wheelock, John Hall
Brooks and
on Perkins
Wolfe and
“Who Murdered the Vets?” (Hemingway)
Wide Eyes and Wings (Colum)
Willkie, Wendell
Will Shakespeare and the Dyer’s Hand (Brooks)
Wilson, Edmund
in break with Perkins
Fitzgerald and
Hemingway and
Wilson, Howard
Windsor, Vt., Perkins’s “Paradise” at
Winesburg, Ohio (Anderson)
Winner Take Nothing (Hemingway)
“Winter Dreams” (Fitzgerald)
Winter Murder Case, The (Van Dine)
Wisdom, William B.
Wister, Owen
Wolfe, Fred
Wolfe, Julia
Wolfe, Mabel. See Wheaton, Mabel Wolfe
Wolfe, Thomas
in affair with Bernstein. See Bernstein, Aline
America as seen by
anti-Semitism and
appearance and personality of
autobiographical vs. “objective” work of
in breaking-and-entering with Perkins
in break with Perkins
criticism and reviews on,
deathbed letter of
despair and agonies of
in disputes and squabbles with Perkins
drinking behavior of
in Europe
family of
fan letters to
father quest and
Fitzgerald and
Germany as seen by
gratitude expressed by
as Harpers author
Harvard Collection of
Hemingway and
illness and death of
lawsuits and
literary and mythical influences on
literary reputation of
massiveness of work by
new publisher sought by
Perkins as character model for
Perkins as literary executor of
Perkins as seen by
Perkins credited for success of
as Perkins family guest
Perkins’s editorial judgments on
Perkins’s first contacts with
Perkins’s personal views on
Perkins’s relationship with
self-estimations of
short stories of
success and fame of
writers influenced by
writing stoppages of. See also specific works
Wolfe, W. O.
Woolf, Virginia
Woollcott, Alexander
World War I,
World War II,
Perkins obsessed with
Wound and the Bow, The (Wilson)
Wright, Willard Huntington (S. S. Van Dine)
Writers in Crisis (Geismar)
Wyckoff, Irma
Wylie, Elinor
Yale Literary Magazine
Yale Review
Yankee Lawyer (Train)
Yearling, The (Rawlings)
Yeats, William Butler
You Can’t Go Home Again (Wolfe)
publication of
Wolfe—Perkins relationship in
You Know Me Al (Lardner)
Young, Stark
Young Die Good, The (Hale)
Youngstrom, Betty
Zola, Émile
Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint the following: Quotations from Editor to Author: The Letters of Maxwell E. Perkins, edited by John Hall Wheelock; quotations from The Letters of F. Scott Fitzgerald; quotations from Dear Scott/Dear Max: The Fitzgerald—Perktns Correspondence, edited by John Kuehl and Jackson Bryer; quotations from The Letters of Thomas Wolfe; and brief excerpts from Ring Around Max: The Correspondence of Ring Lardner & Maxwell Perkins, edited by Clifford Caruthers; Thomas Wolfe’s Letters to His Mother, edited by John Terry; Of Making Many Books, by Roger Burlingame; The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald; A Moveable Feast, by Ernest Hemingway; Look Homeward, Angel, by Thomas Wolfe; The Story of a Novel, by Thomas Wolfe; and Too Strong for Fantasy, by Marcia Davenport are all used with the permission of Charles Scribner’s Sons and are fully protected by copyright. Heretofore unpublished excerpts from Maxwell E. Perkins’s business correspondence are also used with the permission of Charles Scribner’s Sons. 900 words (ad passim) from You Can’t Go Home Again, by Thomas Wolfe. Copyright 1934, 1937, 1938, 1939, 1940 by Maxwell Perkins as Executor; 120 words from The Web and the Rock, by Thomas Wolfe. Copyright 1937, 1938, 1939 by Maxwell Perkins as Executor; and 181 words from “A Note on Thomas Wolfe” in The Hills Beyond, by Thomas Wolfe. Copyright 1935, 1936, 1937, 1939, 1941 by Maxwell Perkins as Executor are all reprinted by permission of Harper & Row Publishers, Inc. Excerpts from the July 1, 1938 and the July 6, 1938 letters of Edward C. Aswell to Thomas Wolfe are reprinted courtesy of Harper & Row Publishers, Inc. Quotatio
n from Living Well Is the Best Revenge, by Calvin Tomkins, which first appeared in The New Yorker, reprinted by permission of the Viking Press. Quotations from Copey of Harvard, by J. Donald Adams, reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin. Quotations from Thomas Wolfe, by Elizabeth Nowell, Copyright © 1960 by Doubleday & Co., Inc., reprinted by permission of the publishers. Quotations from The Letters of Sherwood Anderson, selected and edited by Howard Mumford Jones, reprinted by permission of Little, Brown. Quotations from Call It Experience, by Erskine Caldwell, reprinted by permission of McIntosh & Otis, Inc. Quotations from Van Wyck Brooks: An Autobiography. Copyright © 1954, 1957, 1961 by Van Wyck Brooks; © by Gladys Brooks. Reprinted by permission of the publishers, E. P. Dutton. Quotations from The Crack-Up by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Copyright 1931 by Charles Scribner’s Sons, Copyright 1934 and 1936 by Esquire Inc., Copyright 1945 by New Directions Publishing Corporation. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation. Quotations from Struthers Burt’s “Catalyst for Genius” and Bernard De Voto’s “Genius Is Not Enough” reprinted by permission of The Saturday Review. Quotations from “Unshaken Friend” are copyright 1944 by The New Yorker; renewal copyright 1972 by Malcolm Cowley. Portions of “Thomas Wolfe” by Maxwell E. Perkins were originally published in Harvard Library Bulletin. Unpublished quotations of Thomas Wolfe, permission granted by Paul Gitlin, Administrator, C. T. A. of the Estate of Thomas Wolfe. Unpublished quotations of Ernest Hemingway published with permission granted by Mary Hemingway, Executor of the Estate of Ernest Hemingway. Unpublished quotations of Maxwell E. Perkins, permission granted by Irma Wyckoff Muench, Executrix of the Estate of Maxwell E. Perkins.
A. SCOTT BERG, a 1971 graduate of Princeton University, is the author of four bestselling biographies: Max Parkins: Editor of Genius, based on his senior thesis, became a national bestseller and won the National Book Award; he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for Goldwyn: A Biography; and his biography Lindbergh received the Pulitzer Prize. Kate Remembered, a biographical memoir based on Berg’s twenty-year friendship with Katharine Hepburn, was published in 2003 and became a #1 New York Times bestseller. He lives in Los Angeles.
Max Perkins’s father, Edward C. Perkins, a lawyer in Plainfield, New Jersey, came from a long line of cultivated Bostonians. Max’s mother,
Elizabeth Evarts Perkins, descended from stern New England clergymen and statesman, whom Max described as “rigorous for duty.”
Max at age eight (upper right), surrounded by his brothers Edward and Charles (left and right) and his sister Molly.
Max (seated at right, wearing light suit) was not the only member of the 1907 Harvard Advocate staff to distinguish himself in the world of arts and letters. Van Wyck Brooks (left, mustached), his best friend, became a major essayist and critic; another lifelong friend, Edward Sheldon (standing at center, light suit), wrote a Broadway hit while at Harvard. (By permission of the Houghton Library, Harvard University.)
Louise with the Perkinses’ three oldest daughters—(from left) Peggy, Zippy, and Bertha. Max yearned for boys but fathered five girls.
Louise Saunders at the age of eighteen, four years before she married Max. They had known each other since dancing class in Plainfield. To a friend she spoke of him as “my Greek god. ”
Max about to take a “real walk” from the Plainfield house with his fourth daughter, Jane. This was his customary daughtercarrying position—on the shoulders, one leg down.
1916 : Max (center) on the
Mexican border with National
Guard Squadron A from Plainfield.
The squadron spent three
months trying to capture Pancho
Villa but never even glimpsed
him. Max reread the Iliad
that summer; the southwestern
plains reminded him of Troy.
“Dea incessu patuit” (And
she revealed herself to be a
goddess), Max wrote of Elizabeth
Lemmon in a letter to her
just after they met. A belle of
Baltimore and the Virginia
hunt country, she represented
ideal womanhood to Max.
(She also managed the Upperville,
Virginia, baseball team.)
For twenty-five years they
maintained a platonic love affair.
Max the young editor, about
1920, just after his discovery
of F. Scott Fitzgerald
and the beginning of his
illustrious career at Scribners.
Authors at work :
Fitzgerald (opposite top),
the first of the legendary
Perkins authors, steered him to
two others, Ring Lardner (right),
and Ernest Hemingway
(opposite bottom, shown writing
in Spain during the civil
war). Max saw each of the three
through severe personal and
professional difficulties; his
warmth and steadfast support
meant as much to them as
his editorial guidance.
(Bettmann Archive;
Granger Collection; © Robert Capa,
John F. Kennedy Library)
Thomas Wolfe with one of the three crates containing the manuscript of Of Time and the River. Wolfe’s novel was the challenge of Perkins’s lifetime. The massive editing job consumed two intense, often violent years, resulting first in a great success and then in a rift between author and editor. The book was dedicated to Perkins : “A great editor ... and unshaken friend.” (Robert Disraeli Films)
Two Perkins bestsellers : Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings (top), at her Cross Creek, Florida, home; her greatest success, the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Yearling, was a book Perkins conceived and kept after her for years to write. James Jones (bottom), inspired by the story of Wolfe and Perkins, brought Max his own autobiographical novel, which was declined; then Perkins urged him to write From Here to Eternity. It was the last book Perkins edited. (Both photographs courtesy of Charles Scribner’s Sons)
Max was famous for one eccentricity: wearing a hat indoors and out, nearly all the time. The caricature ran with Malcolm Cowley’s New Yorker profile of Perkins. (Illustration by A. Birnbaum © 1994 The New Yorker Magazine Inc. All rights reserved.)
A meeting in Max’s office
between two very different Perkins
authors : S.S. Van Dine (left),
author of the enormously
successful Philo Vance mysteries,
was elegant and intellectual;
Hemingway scorned “literary”
writers and seldom wore a tie.
At right, Charles Scribner III and
Perkins. (Robert Disraeli Films)
Key West, 1935 : Max, Ernest,
and trophies. Hemingway tried
annually to get the busy editor
away from his desk for adventurous
holidays. Not satisfied that
this, one of his few successful
attempts, was properly recorded,
Hemingway took a picture
himself (far right).
Max’s features play through the faces of his five beloved daughters : (from left) Peggy, Jane, Bertha, Zippy, and Nancy.
Max in the company of his wife (left) and Aline Bernstein, who had been Thomas Wolfe’s lover and early inspiration. Both women had resented the amount of time that Max spent with Wolfe. (Carl Mydans, Life magazine © Time Inc.)
Louise late in life. Frustrated by a prenuptial vow she had made to Max to give up her acting aspirations, she converted to Roman Catholicism, which annoyed him even more than her passion for the theater.
One of the last photographs of Maxwell Perkins. (Al Ravenna)
1 Perkins misspelled the title. All spellings and punctuation are preserved in the directly quoted material in this book, except where the error might cause confusion.
2 The next stage after galley
s, long printed sheets with errors corrected and the pages numbered.
3 Trade books are books of fiction and nonfiction that are sold through the trade—bookstores and other commercial outlets—as distinct from textbooks and other technical books, which are sold differently.
4 “What a pleasure it was to publish that! It was as perfect a thing as I ever had any share in publishing,” Max wrote Scott about Gatsby in that same letter. “One does not seem to get such satisfaction as that any more.”
Max Perkins Page 64