1884 Maxwell Perkins – or Max to everyone who knew him – who worked at the august publishers Charles Scribner’s Sons from 1910 until his death in 1947, was one of those editors who exist today only in the dreams of aspiring authors. He actually went out looking for unknown writers, and when he found them, he made up his own mind about their work, brought it on and nurtured it. When he joined the firm, Scribner’s was a distinguished, if somewhat staid publishing house. Its authors included Edith Wharton, then in mid-career, and Henry James, his major fiction behind him, now into his autobiography.
On the lookout for younger writers, Perkins came across the 23-year-old F. Scott Fitzgerald, who had been trying, and failing, to interest publishers in a blushful Bildungsroman about doomed youth that he called The Romantic Egoist. Perkins took it on, suggested radical revisions and a new title (never Fitzgerald’s strong point – see 7 November), and forced it through his colleagues’ resistance. This Side of Paradise came out in March 1920, selling out its first print run of 3,000 copies in three days. The next day Scott felt enough confidence in his future to marry his sweetheart Zelda Sayre. By the end of 1921 the novel had gone through twelve printings, selling nearly 50,000 copies.
In other words, Perkins could pick them. Through Fitzgerald he met Ernest Hemingway, snaffling up his first novel, The Sun Also Rises, and publishing it in 1926. Together with Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925) it set the themes and (more important) the tone of a literary decade. Among other authors Perkins discovered or got into print were Erskine Caldwell, James Jones, J.P. Marquand and Alan Paton.
But he wasn’t just an astute talent scout. Once he got them on board, Perkins would cosset his authors like a broody hen, coping with their drunkenness and self-doubt, forever encouraging them, even lending them money from time to time. When they panicked about their prose, he would say: ‘Just get it down on paper, and then we’ll see what to do with it.’
In the editorial process itself he wasn’t very hot on the details, but he was a genius when it came to the larger structure. After a long struggle he persuaded Thomas Wolfe to cut 66,000 words (not 90,000, as is commonly reported) from O Lost, another disastrously titled first novel that no one else wanted to publish, to turn it into Look Homeward Angel (1929), still a healthy first-born weighing in at 233,000 words on 626 pages.