Word: berge
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...early '30s continues to fascinate. Americans have eagerly poured over biographies of Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Thomas Wolfe and the like. Of the man who went so far toward establishing the reputation of these writers, however, little was known save scraps of stories and legends. Now, Scott Berg's biography goes far toward illuminating the life of Maxwell Perkins, an editor for Scribner's who came to occupy a unique position in the history of American literature and publishing...
...Ozawa in San Francisco has not been easy for De Waart. Ozawa is a spellbinder and a colorist. De Waart, who will continue with the Rotterdam Philharmonic another year, is a solid, serious musician. He programs lots of the classics, Mozart and Haydn, but also likes such modernists as Berg and Bartok. "None of the young conductors has a wide repertory, but De Waart is anxious to learn and that separates him from the rest," says Milton Salkind, president of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. De Waart is not worried: "Herbert von Karajan once said it takes ten years...
Biographer A. Scott Berg, who began this project as a Princeton senior thesis eight years ago, thus had to struggle with his subject, trying to make a hero out of a man who always fancied himself a spear carrier. In preparation, Berg sifted through Perkins' massive correspondence, including an unsuspected cache of platonic and rather wistful love letters to a younger woman, and interviewed everyone he could find who had a Perkins anecdote to tell. The result is a draw. Perkins emerges as both anonymous and heroic...
...Berg includes far too many familiar anecdotes about the depressions and binges of Perkins' famous authors. A law should be passed, in particular, banning any retelling of the booze-soaked Fitzgerald legend for at least 30 years. But it is easy to see why Berg had to fall back on these dog-eared tales. The dramas in Perkins' life occurred in solitude. The thing that distinguished this editor from thousands and thousands of other industrious office workers was a private, inaccessible gift. He could read a manuscript and see the book that the author had hoped to write...
...pity that Perkins could not see the manuscript of his biography. He enjoyed finding promising young writers, and Berg, 28, is one of that small group. He might have indicated some cutting that the book as published could use. And although he would have been embarrassed by the attention, Berg's tribute would have touched...