Robert Gottlieb, editor of Pulitzer Prize-winning classics, dies at 92
Robert Gottlieb, the inspired and eclectic literary editor whose brilliant career was launched with Joseph Heller’sBelovedGottlieb died Wednesday of natural causes at a New York hospital, Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group announced. Caro, who had worked for decades with Gottlieb on his Lyndon Johnson biographies and was featured with him last year in the documentary, said in a statement that he had never worked with an editor so attuned to the writing process.
Gottlieb, tall and assured, with wavy dark hair and dark-rimmed glasses, had one of the greatest runs of any editor after World War II and helped shape the modern publishing canon. His projects included fiction by future Nobel laureates Morrison,Doris Lessing and V.S. Naipaul; spy novels by John le Carre, essays by Nora Ephron, science thrillers by Michael Crichton and Caro’s nonfiction epics.
He eventually attended Columbia, from which he graduated in 1952. After studying two years in England, at Cambridge University, and working briefly in theatre, Gottlieb joined Simon & Schuster in 1955 as an editorial assistant, an upstart claiming he took the job to support his wife and child but also so confident that – even then – he regarded himself as “a better reader than anybody else,” he recalled in the documentary.
Success only accelerated his drive. He signed up such rising authors as Edna O’Brien, Mordecai Richler and Len Deighton and was hip enough to acquire John Lennon’s collection of verse, vignettes and drawings,. He later worked with Bob Dylan on a book of his lyrics and was amazed to find that “this genius rebel and superstar was almost childlike – you felt he barely knew how to tie his shoes, let alone write a check.”and struggling with John Kennedy Toole’s.
An acknowledged workaholic, Gottlieb was also the most personal of editors. When Ephron’s marriage to Carl Bernstein broke up, she and her children stayed for a few months with Gottlieb. He not only called male writers “dear boy,” but eyed every line of such marathons as, for which Gottlieb and Caro spent several contentious weeks – side by side – cutting some 300,000 words from a manuscript that originally topped 1 million and still ended up at more than 1,200 pages.
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