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Janel Johnson on Maxwell Perkins
Maxwell Perkins discovers the voice of his generation.Janel Johnson examines the editor who nurtured Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Wolfe.
"Just get it down on paper, and then we'll see what to do about it." -- Maxwell Perkins's Advice to Writers. Compiled and edited by Jon Winokur, Pantheon Books, 1999.
Known as the greatest American editor, Maxwell Perkins discovered, nurtured, and published such leading American writers as F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and Thomas Wolfe, thus defining the literary voice of America after the First World War.
Born in 1884 in New York City, Maxwell Perkins attended Harvard University. Upon graduation, he landed a job as a reporter for the New York Times, where, according to the Thomas Wolfe website, he discovered "one of those professions whose practitioners deal in the most powerful of all commodities -- words." Soon tiring of the erratic life of a journalist, Perkins took a job in the advertising department at Charles Scribner's Sons publishing house in New York City.
Charles Scribner had made his reputation publishing classic American writers such as Henry James and Edith Wharton. By the time Maxwell Perkins moved up to the fifth-floor editorial department, the company had grown staid. Explains biographer A. Scott Berg, Perkins "sought out authors who were not just 'safe,' conventional in style and bland in content, but who spoke in a new voice about the new values of the postwar world."
The first writer Perkins went to bat for at Scribner's was a young F. Scott Fitzgerald. Scribner's had already rejected a few of Fitzgerald's manuscripts when Perkins began working with him on This Side of Paradise. The older editors at Scribner's balked at the unfamiliar writing style, but when it was finally published, Fitzgerald's first novel sold 35,000 copies and embodied the voice of young America.
Fitzgerald introduced Perkins to a young American writer living in Paris named Ernest Hemingway. When Perkins brought Hemingway's work to Charles Scribner (then 72), Scribner was shocked by the subject matter and frequent use of profanity. Perkins convinced Hemingway to tone down the language and Scribner's published The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms to great critical acclaim.
According to the Thomas Wolfe Memorial website, Perkins's greatest editorial challenge came shortly thereafter when he received a manuscript from a young Thomas Wolfe. Wolfe wrote copiously and had a sentimental attachment to every word that flowed from his pen. After much cajoling, Perkins was able to cut 90,000 words from Wolfe's first novel, Look Homeward Angel, and it was published in 1929.
Perkins earned a reputation as an editor who sought out good, strong writing. He nurtured writers not only as an editor or businessman but also as a friend. He oversaw Fitzgerald's finances, he maintained a life-long correspondence with Hemingway, and he worked as Wolfe's literary executor.
Maxwell Perkins died in 1947.
"An editor does not add to a book. At best he serves as a handmaiden to an author. Don't ever get to feeling important about yourself, because an editor at most releases energy. He creates nothing." -- Maxwell Perkins to a group of student editors from New York University, 1946. From A. Scott Berg's Max Perkins: Editor of Genius, Berkeley Books, 1978.
Posted April 2010
