Editor to author : the letters of Maxwell E. Perkins

This is one of my all-time favorite books and my absolutely favorite book of letters.I'm a textbook editor myself, and I first read this book fairly early in my career. I learned from Perkins how to respond to authors in a helpful way that would soothe them and get them to do what I wanted. From that point of view, it was almost a textbook on how to get along with authors. Besides that, the book was terrifically entertaining and interesting. Max Perkins was the literary intimate of almost every great American writer of the first half of the twentieth century: Thomas Wolfe, Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings (The Yearling), and many others.