Maxwell Perkins

Maxwell Perkins

William Maxwell Evarts ("Max") Perkins (born September 20, 1884 in New York ; † June 17, 1947 in Stamford (Connecticut) ) was an American editor who worked for Scribner’s publishing house , including Ernest Hemingway , F. Scott Fitzgerald and Thomas Wolfe supervised. Fitzgerald expert Matthew J. Bruccoli called him the only lecturer in the history of American literature known to most American studies students.

Life

Maxwell Perkins grew up in New York City and graduated from Harvard College in 1907 . While majoring in economics, he had attended college literature classes under Charles Townsend Copeland .

After briefly working as a reporter for The New York Times , he was hired as an editor in 1910 at the prestigious Charles Scribner's Sons publishing house . In the same year he married Louise Saunders, with whom he had five daughters.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

F. Scott Fitzgerald, photograph by Carl van Vechten , 1937

At the time Perkins joined the publishing house, Scribner's was best known for its publications by respected and established US authors such as John Galsworthy , Henry James and Edith Wharton . Although Perkins also valued these classics of American literature, he was keen to discover new talent. His first great discovery was F. Scott Fitzgerald. Perkins had expressed interest in his first novel manuscript The Romantic Egoist , but had to reject both the first draft in August 1918 and the version in October 1918, which was revised on his suggestions. Perkins, however, succeeded in publishing his colleagues from the third version, the title Fitzgerald This Side of Paradise ( This Side of Paradise to convince) had changed, and in September 1919, the novel by Scribner's was accepted. The work was very well received by literary critics, and Fitzgerald's biographer Scott Donaldson describes the sales success as remarkable by any measure. The portrait of the young generation after the end of the First World War and especially of the flappers and their emancipated way of life made the 23-year-old Fitzgerald famous overnight. The publication of the novel also marked the growth of a new generation of authors whose names were associated with Perkins.

Perkins was also the editor of Fitzgerald's third novel The Great Gatsby ( The Great Gatsby ), which is now considered one of the most important works of American modernism is classified. An extensively preserved correspondence between Perkins and F. Scott Fitzgerald shows how much Fitzgerald benefited from Perkins' suggestions in revising the draft novel. In October 1924, F. Scott Fitzgerald, who was living in Europe at the time, had sent the manuscript to both Perkins and his literary agent Harold Ober. On November 20, 1924, Perkins responded with a long, careful analysis of the design. Perkins found the figure of Gatsby too vague, he also criticized a lengthy explanation of Gatsby's biography in Chapter 8 and suggested to Fitzgerald that details about Gatsby's life path should only gradually be disclosed in the course of the story and also the source of his wealth. Fitzgerald, who was in Rome at the time, replied to Perkins' letter on December 1, 1924 and assured Perkins that he would take up his suggestions. Fitzgerald later generously attributed a major influence on the narrative structure of The Great Gatsby to Perkins .

Ernest Hemingway and Thomas Wolfe

Through Fitzgerald, Perkins also met the young Ernest Hemingway and published his first great novel The Sun Also Rises in 1926 . With its sometimes coarse language, this novel was a bold book at the time and Perkins had to work hard for this work within his publishing house. The commercial success of Hemingway's next novel In Another Land (1929) strengthened Perkins' position as an editor within Scribner.

Perkins also edited the work of Thomas Wolfe , who was undoubtedly an unusually gifted author, but who at the same time lacked any artistic self-discipline. Perkins struggled to remove more than 90,000 words from his first novel Look Homeward, Angel (1929). Wolfe's next novel Of Time and the River (1935) was published only after a two-year battle between Perkins and Wolfe, in which Wolfe added more and more pages to the manuscript while Perkins worked in parallel to limit the scope of the novel. Wolfe was initially very grateful to Perkins for discovering him as a writer. At the same time, however, he also suffered from the public perception that he owed his literary success to the interventions of his editor. Wolfe eventually broke up with Scribner's publishing house after a series of arguments. At the same time, however, Wolfe made Perkins his literary administrator and referred to him as one of his closest friends.

Erskine Caldwell

Erskine Caldwell, 1938, photo by Carl van Vechten

In the case of Erskine Caldwell , it was again F. Scott Fitzgerald who brought the author to Perkins' attention. As early as 1931, Scribner's had published Caldwell's first major work, American Earth . In this collection of short stories, Caldwell addressed the brutal effects of poverty and described, among other things, lynching . 1932 published Scribner's Die Tabakstrasse (English original title Tobacco Road ). Tobacco Street , the literary value of which was controversial at the time of its publication, is now counted among the most important novels of the 20th century. The novel is grotesquely tragic about the life of a completely impoverished tenant family in the US state of Georgia during the worst phase of the Great Depression , the severe economic crisis at the beginning of the 1930s. The family is so poor that their lives are dominated only by the fulfillment of the most basic needs: the satisfaction of their hunger and their sexual desires. The Modern Library included the novel in its list of the 100 Most Important American Novels of the 20th Century. In 2009, the British newspaper The Guardian listed the novel among the 1000 novels that everyone must have read, and Joachim Kaiser also lists the novel among the 1000 most important works in literary history . Caldwell's biggest sales success, God's Little Acre (God's little acre) , was published in 1933 but at Viking Press.

Other authors

While Perkins' fame as an editor is most closely tied to the names of Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Wolfe, he has overseen a number of other notable writers. He was the first to publish JP Marquand . He was also responsible for the great success of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings , whose first novel The Yearling (1938) was based on suggestions from Perkins. The work became an instant bestseller and won the Pulitzer Prize . Alan Paton's Cry, the Beloved Country (1946) was another novel discovered by Perkins. The penultimate discovery in his life was the author James Jones , who approached him in 1945. Perkins persuaded Jones to stop working on the novel he was working on and encouraged him to begin work on the work, which appeared in 1951 under the title From Here to Eternity . Perkins' health was already in bad shape by this point and he saw neither that success nor the success of Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea (1952), which was dedicated to him. Perkins' last literary discovery was Marguerite Young , who began her monumental work Miss MacIntosh, My Darling with his encouragement in 1947. He had only signed a contract with her on the basis of a 40-page draft novel. The novel was ultimately published in 1965.

literature

• Harald Bloom (Ed.): F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby . New York 2006, ISBN 0-7910-8580-5 .
• Matthew J. Bruccoli (Ed.): F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby" . Gale, Detroit 2000, ISBN 0-7876-3128-0 .
• Ruth Prigozy (Ed.): The Cambridge Companion to F. Scott Fitzgerald . Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 2002, ISBN 0-521-62474-6 .
• Nicolas Tredell: Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby . Continuum International Publishing Group, New York 2007, ISBN 978-08264-9011-7 .
• A. Scott Berg : Max Perkins: Editor of Genius . New York: Dutton, 1978

Movie

Based on the book Max Perkins: Editor of Genius by A. Scott Berg , the film Genius - The Thousand Pages of Friendship was released in 2016 .

Single receipts

1. ↑ ^{a b} Matthew Bruccoli [2004]: The Sons of Maxwell Perkins: Letters of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Thomas Wolfe, and Their editor . University of South Carolina Press, Columbia, South Carolina 2004, ISBN 978-0-224-61721-5 , p. Xvii: "Maxwell Perkins (1884-1947) is the only literary editor of whom students of American literature and most of their teachers have heard. "
2. ↑ Prigozy: The Cambridge dance companies to F. Scott Fitzgerald. 2002, p. XVIII
3. ↑ Scott Donaldson: Fitzgerald's nonfiction. In: Pregozy (Ed.): The Cambridge Companion to F. Scott Fitzgerald. 2002, p. 165. The original quote is: By any standard, the sales of 'This Side of Paradise' was remarkable. Its portrayal of the younger generation, and particularly of the flappet and her liberated ways, made the twenty-three-year-old famous overnight.
4. ↑ Bruccoli (ed.): F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby - A Literary Reference. 2002, pp. 54, 55.
5. ↑ Bruccoli (ed.): F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby - A Literary Reference. 2002, p. 55.
6. ↑ Caldwell's biography on Georgia Encyclopedia, accessed February 1, 2014.
7. ↑ Modern Library - 100 best novels. Retrieved February 1, 2014.
8. ↑ 1000 Novels Everyone Must Read: The Definitive List. Retrieved February 1, 2014.
9. ↑ Perkins, Maxwell Evarts; Baughman, Judith, The sons of Maxwell Perkins: letters of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Thomas Wolfe, and their editor. University of South Carolina Press, 2004. Cf. p. xxvii