Robert Gottlieb, one of the most important book editors of his time, has died at the age of 92.
,’ I had the anxiety of a new writer who needs to make sure every sentence is exactly the right one,” she once said. “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, ‘,’ Bob said to me, ‘You can loosen, open up.’ It was as if he had said, ‘Be reckless in your imagination.
Some of Gottlieb’s editorial interventions became public. In 1961, Joseph Heller was coming out with a darkly comic war novel that he had titled “Catch-18.” Unfortunately, Leon Uris, the best-selling author of “Exodus,” was about to publish a novel called “Mila 18.” Gottlieb had a late-night revelation and called Heller, recommending that the title be changed to “,” which, he declared, was somehow “funnier.
Gottlieb was born in 1931, in New York City. At the dinner table, he and his parents all read books. After dinner, he went on reading. “From the start, words were more real to me than real life, and certainly more interesting,” he wrote in his memoir, “.” Gottlieb was a showoff, but not of the athletic sort. When he was in high school, he read “War and Peace” in “a single marathon fourteen-hour session.” As an undergraduate, at Columbia, he read Proust: “seven volumes, seven days.
, the revered editor of the magazine, had been in his chair, either as one of Harold Ross’s top deputies or as editor, for more than four decades. He seemed unable to conceive of a future for the institution that didn’t include him. S. I. Newhouse, whose family owned both Knopf and, decided to force the issue and replaced Shawn with Gottlieb. This caused a moment of pain and tumult at the magazine.
Gottlieb politely declined to decline the job. Although he certainly published an enormous number of distinguished pieces of writing in
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