The Time of Their Lives: The Golden Age of Great American Book Publishers, Their Editors and Authors

An excellent look at the snotty, talentless little prigs who fasten onto writers like leeches, getting their ego rocks off by screwing with their work. Writers hate them, but mostly won't say so because these little lightweights are the gatekeepers. So they butter them up, but between each other refer to them as "idiotors." I didn't see any mention of the fact that 85% of their books fall dead off the presses. That's only a 15% success rate. In any other business, that would be a formula for failure. Good bits on Ken McCormick, the genius who brought Doubleday back from bankruptcy, and who generously subsidized countless writers, and never tampered with their work. Consequently he had more bestsellers than anyone else. His story of meeting Pat Nixon in the kitchen was just like him. Ken's career alone could make a book, but mostly publishing has forgotten him. When Publishers Weekly made a list of the leading editors of the 20th century, he didn't even get a mention. If the world can forget him, you know what the rest of them are worth. If a writer's got anything, his name lives on at least a little while, but who remembers editors? And they change jobs and leave the business even more rapidly now than they used to.

The author has had a long and distinguished career in American publishing, including being president of the Book-of-the-Month Club and an editor, and seems to know personally about everybody engaged in American publishing between 1946 and the early 1980's. It is his contention that the post-war period until the early 1980's was at least as much a golden age of publishing as were the 1920's and 1930's with figures such as the legendary Max Perkins. Whether or not one agrees entirely with this assertion, the book does focus upon an extremely fascinating period and group of folks. The author simply went out and interviewed 120 "eyewitnesses" who had been engaged in publishing during this period at a variety of publishers: Knopf, Atheneum, Viking, Doubleday, Harper, and Little Brown to name just a few are discussed in individual chapters. The major paperback houses also are included. Because the author was interviewing his "own", he is just wonderful at filling out his pictures of what publishing was and how it operated during this period with insiders' perspectives. My only problem with the book, which despite its nearly 500 page length moves quickly, is that it is hard to keep all the large cast of characters and companies straight as you pass through the chapters. I also longed for a bit more of an explanation of exactly how editors "edit." His portraits of some key players, such as Alfred A. Knopf, Robert Gottlieb, and George Braziller, add enormously to the richness of the narrative. A small bibliography and some interesting photographs are included, as well as a solid index. A valuable book that is also quite interesting to read.