Robert Gottlieb, celebrated literary editor of Toni Morrison and Robert Caro, dies at 92
Robert Gottlieb, the inspired and eclectic literary editor whose brilliant career was launched with Joseph Heller’s
“Catch-22” and continued for decades with such Pulitzer Prize-winning classics as Toni Morrison’s “Beloved” and Robert Caro’s “The Power Broker,” has died at age 92.
Gottlieb died Wednesday of natural causes at a New York hospital, Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group announced. Caro, who had worked for decades with Gottlieb on his Lyndon Johnson biographies and was featured with him last year in the documentary “Turn Every Page,” said in a statement that he had never worked with an editor so attuned to the writing process.
“From the day 52 years ago that we first looked at my pages together, Bob understood what I was trying to do and made it possible for me to take the time, and do the work, I needed to do,” Caro said in a statement. “People talk to me about some of the triumphant moments Bob and I shared, but today I remember other moments, tough ones, and I remember how Bob was always, always, for half a century, there for me. He was a great friend, and today I mourn my friend with all my heart.”
Tall and assured, with wavy dark hair and darkrimmed glasses, Gottlieb had one of the greatest runs of any editor after World War II. His credits included fiction by future Nobel laureates Morrison, Doris Lessing and V.S. Naipaul; spy novels by John le Carré, essays by Nora Ephron, science thrillers by Michael Crichton and Caro’s nonfiction epics. He also edited memoirs by Katharine Hepburn, Lauren Bacall and Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham, whose “Personal History” won a Pulitzer. Gottlieb so impressed Bill Clinton that the former president signed with Alfred A. Knopf in part for the chance to work with Gottlieb on his memoir “My Life.”
Uniquely well-read and unstuffy, he was the rare soul who would claim to have finished “War and Peace” in a single weekend (some reports narrowed it to a single day) and also collected plastic handbags that filled shelves above his bed.
Gottlieb’s reputation was made during his time as editor-in-chief of Simon & Schuster and later
Alfred A. Knopf, where in recent years he worked as an editor-at-large. But he also edited The New Yorker
for five years before departing over “conceptual differences” with publisher S.I. Newhouse. His memoir, “Avid Reader,” came out in 2016.
He was married twice, the second time to actor Maria Tucci, and had three children. He was otherwise so absorbed in work — he was looking over early proofs of a Cynthia Ozick book while counting contractions for his pregnant wife — that the author Thomas Mallon summed up his life as a “busman’s holiday without any brakes.”
In “Turn Every Page,” a joint biography of Caro and Gottlieb directed by the editor’s daughter, Lizzie Gottlieb, Robert Gottlieb referred to editing as “a service job.”
Caro is still writing his fifth and presumed final volume of the Johnson biographies, a series begun nearly 50 years ago. A Knopf Doubleday spokesperson would not comment on who might serve as its editor.
Born and raised in Manhattan, Gottlieb was a lifelong bookworm who recalled taking out up to four novels a day from his local public library. As a teenager, he would visit the library at Columbia University, studying the bestseller lists.
He eventually attended Columbia, from which he graduated in 1952. After studying two years in England, at Cambridge University, and working briefly in theater, Gottlieb joined Simon & Schuster in 1955 as an editorial assistant.
Within two years, he had taken on a former
World War II pilot named Joseph Heller and his partially written novel about the war titled “Catch-18.” Gottlieb convinced skeptical executives at Simon & Schuster to give the novel a chance.
“The funny parts are wildly funny, the serious parts are excellent,” he told the editorial board.
Gottlieb paid $1,500 for the novel, $750 upon signing Heller, $750 after publication. He also made some “broad suggestions,” including changing the title to “Catch-22,” to avoid confusion with Leon Uris’ “Mila 18.”
The book eventually became a blockbuster and counterculture touchstone, and Gottlieb became a literary celebrity.
He signed up such rising authors as Edna O’Brien, Mordecai Richler and Len Deighton and was hip enough to acquire John Lennon’s collection of verse, vignettes and drawings, “In His Own Write.” He later worked with Bob Dylan on a book of his lyrics and was amazed to find that “this genius rebel and superstar was almost childlike — you felt he barely knew how to tie his shoes, let alone write a check.”
An acknowledged workaholic, Gottlieb was also the most personal of editors. When Ephron’s marriage to Carl Bernstein broke up, she and her children stayed for a few months with Gottlieb. He not only called male writers “dear boy,” but eyed every line of such marathons as “The Power Broker,” for which Gottlieb and Caro spent several contentious weeks — side by side — cutting some 300,000 words from a manuscript that originally topped 1 million and still ended up at more than 1,200 pages.
“You don’t take on books with which you do not have a sympathy,” Gottlieb told The Guardian in 2016. “Only trouble can arise if instead of wanting to make a book that you like even better than it is, you want to change it into something that it isn’t.”
Gottlieb was equally exacting after signing up a young medical student named Michael Crichton and his novel, “The Andromeda Strain.” He loved Crichton’s story of a deadly virus, but wanted more plot and factual details and less character development.
“He would call me up and say, ‘Dear boy! I have read your manuscript, and here is what you have to do,’” Crichton told The Paris Review in 1994. “And he was not above saying, ‘I don’t know if you can do it this way... which of course would drive me into a fury of effort.’ ”