Robert Gottlieb, the legendary editor at Simon & Schuster, Alfred A. Knopf and The New Yorker who helped shape the work of many of the world’s greatest writers over the past six decades, has died, according to Knopf and The New Yorker. He was 92.
A smattering of the literary talents whose work Gottlieb edited include Nobel laureates such as Toni Morrison, Doris Lessing and V.S. Naipaul; bestselling novelists such as John le Carré, Michael Crichton and Ray Bradbury; Hollywood types such as Bob Dylan, Elia Kazan, Katharine Hepburn, Sidney Poitier, Nora Ephron and Lauren Bacall; Pulitzer Prize-winners such as John Cheever, Katharine Graham and Robert Caro; and even a president, Bill Clinton.
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Gottlieb was featured in the documentary Turn Every Page, directed by his daughter Lizzie, which premiered at last year’s Tribeca Festival and was picked up by Sony Pictures Classics. The film focuses on Gottlieb and Caro as they as they work methodically to complete the final volume of Caro’s Lyndon Johnson biography, a project which has spanned decades.
Though focused on literature, Gottlieb’s work had a profound impact in the world of entertainment. Dozens of the classics he edited went on to be adapted for the big and small screen
As an editor, Gottlieb hit pay dirt from the start. In the late ’50s at Simon & Schuster, he was dazzled by a manuscript entitled Catch-18, by an advertising copywriter. Due to its similarity to a title from Leon Uris, Gottlieb convinced the book’s author, Joseph Heller, to change it to Catch-22. The book, of course, became a classic, with the title entering the American lexicon.
Gottlieb helped a young medical student named Michael Crichton craft what would become the first book published under his real name: The Andromeda Strain. It went on to become a bestseller and eventually a film and then a miniseries.
In the early ’70s, he edited Caro’s Pulitzer-Prize winning biography of Robert Moses, The Power Broker which he cut from a million-word manuscript to around 600,000 words.
Of his process, he told the Paris Review in 1994, “I read a manuscript very quickly, the moment I get it. I usually won’t use a pencil the first time through because I’m just reading for impressions. When I read the end, I’ll call the writer and say, I think it’s very fine (or whatever), but I think there are problems here and here. At that point I don’t know why I think that—I just think it.”
In 1987 Gottlieb succeeded the legendary William Shawn as editor of The New Yorker. During his tenure, he published important pieces that included John Cheever’s diaries, Ian Frazier’s “Great Plains,” and Janet Malcolm’s “The Journalist and the Murderer.” He brought in Julian Barnes to write a Letter from London and Joan Didion to offer her take on California. He published short stories by Denis Johnson that later became the collection Jesus’ Son. The book later became a film starring Billy Crudup.
He stayed at the New Yorker until 1992, when Tina Brown was brought in to do modernize the magazine. Gottlieb decamped for Knopf, where he picked up where he left off at Simon & Schuster.
Gottlieb wasn’t perfect. He rejected Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove and, while sensing genius, struggled to for years edit John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces before finally giving up.
Gottlieb’s autobiography, Avid Reader: A Life, was published in 2016.
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