Word: fitzgerald
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...although he would go on to skillfully edit James Jones' From Here to Eternity and Alan Paton's Cry, The Beloved Country in the remaining 15 months of his life, he knew his great achievements lay behind him--he would be remembered for his discovery of Fitzgerald, his faith in the young Hemingway and his exhausting work with Thomas Wolfe...
Berg for example, is clearly ascinated by Perkin's odd relations with women--describing in detail his platonic ove for Elizabeth Lemmon, his stromy marriage, and his fights with Zelda Fitzgerald and Aline Berstein. Thomas Wolfe's lover--but does not attempt to find in them some secret to Perkins' great eye for fine writers. Rather, Berg simply presents his information about Maxwell Perkins the man, and then moves on to describe his relations with his authors and the conservative elite at Charles Scribners Sons...
With the easy wisdom of hindsight, it is simple enough to cast the young Perkins as the great innovator; and yet, Perkins did not completely share the enthusiasm of writers like Hemingway and Pound for building all literature anew. Perkins, above all, was searching for what Fitzgerald called "the real thing," for Max clung to no dogmatic view of literature and asked only for writing that would vicariously bring readers a little closer to real life...
Perkins found in Fitzgerald a man whose writing captured the spirit of The Jazz Age--even though Perkins was a little skeptical of all those flappers--in Hemingway someone who lived the exciting kind of life that Perkins so admired, and in Wolfe a man who had come to a strong, profound understanding of America and its people...
Lovers of Hemingway. Fitzgerald, Wolfe, Lardner and company will devour Berg's book if for nothing more than the anecdotes about the writers. Though Berg adds little to the voluminous scholarship on these writers, there emerges from Perkins' letters and trivia a picture of the writers maintained over and over again that they didn't give a damn about what the critics said; but they always listened to Perkins' advice and--as the letters show--followed it closely. Perkins, of course, remained equally loyal to his writers, giving a seemingly limitless supply of encouragement, advice and advance money from...