OF AUTHORS AND EDITORS.....
From The Writer's Almanac November 17, 2009:
On this day in 1936, Scribner's Maxwell Perkins wrote a letter to Thomas Wolfe that chronicled one of the most famous conflicts between editor and novelist in the history of American publishing. Perkins had helped to discover the young and unknown Thomas Wolfe (along with Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald) and helped shape Wolfe's manuscripts into book form. He sat down with Wolfe — and his first manuscript, O, Lost, written in just 20 months — and helped him cut more than 60,000 words; the finished product, published while Wolfe was in his 20s, was still 544 pages long and now entitled Look Homeward, Angel (1929), from a poem by John Milton.
The manuscript for Thomas Wolfe's second work was as lengthy as Proust's Remembrance of Things Past. Wolfe had written an epic composed of multiple volumes. Perkins insisted it would sell better if it were a manageably sized single-volume book, and he went to work with Wolfe trimming down the tome. Wolfe dedicated that completed novel, Of Time and the River (1935), to Perkins. He wrote in his diary the start of unsent letter to Maxwell Perkins that said, "In all my life, until I met you, I never had a friend." But soon after the publication of Of Time and the River, rumors began to circulate in the literary world that Wolfe's ability to shape his books into something publishable, and his success and his literary genius even, were overly dependent on Maxwell Perkins's editing. Wolfe grew resentful at Perkins for his editing and for the cuts to his manuscripts. Wolfe hinted that he was going to break ties with Scribner's.
Perkins tried to instill confidence into the self-doubting Wolfe, and to preserve their personal and business relationships. He hand-wrote a letter to Thomas Wolfe on this day in 1936 that said, "I never knew a soul with whom I felt I was in such fundamentally complete agreement as you. […] You must surely know, though, that any publisher would leap at the chance to publish you."
Despite Perkins's efforts, Wolfe broke ties with Scribner's and signed with Harper and Brothers, and he and Perkins became estranged. Wolfe died at the age of 37 from tuberculosis. On his deathbed he wrote a conciliatory letter to Perkins that concluded: "I shall always think of you and feel about you the way it was that Fourth of July day three years ago when you met me at the boat, and we went out on the cafe on the river and had a drink and later went on top of the tall building, and all the strangeness and the glory and the power of life and of the city was below."
On this day in 1936, Scribner's Maxwell Perkins wrote a letter to Thomas Wolfe that chronicled one of the most famous conflicts between editor and novelist in the history of American publishing. Perkins had helped to discover the young and unknown Thomas Wolfe (along with Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald) and helped shape Wolfe's manuscripts into book form. He sat down with Wolfe — and his first manuscript, O, Lost, written in just 20 months — and helped him cut more than 60,000 words; the finished product, published while Wolfe was in his 20s, was still 544 pages long and now entitled Look Homeward, Angel (1929), from a poem by John Milton.
The manuscript for Thomas Wolfe's second work was as lengthy as Proust's Remembrance of Things Past. Wolfe had written an epic composed of multiple volumes. Perkins insisted it would sell better if it were a manageably sized single-volume book, and he went to work with Wolfe trimming down the tome. Wolfe dedicated that completed novel, Of Time and the River (1935), to Perkins. He wrote in his diary the start of unsent letter to Maxwell Perkins that said, "In all my life, until I met you, I never had a friend." But soon after the publication of Of Time and the River, rumors began to circulate in the literary world that Wolfe's ability to shape his books into something publishable, and his success and his literary genius even, were overly dependent on Maxwell Perkins's editing. Wolfe grew resentful at Perkins for his editing and for the cuts to his manuscripts. Wolfe hinted that he was going to break ties with Scribner's.
Perkins tried to instill confidence into the self-doubting Wolfe, and to preserve their personal and business relationships. He hand-wrote a letter to Thomas Wolfe on this day in 1936 that said, "I never knew a soul with whom I felt I was in such fundamentally complete agreement as you. […] You must surely know, though, that any publisher would leap at the chance to publish you."
Despite Perkins's efforts, Wolfe broke ties with Scribner's and signed with Harper and Brothers, and he and Perkins became estranged. Wolfe died at the age of 37 from tuberculosis. On his deathbed he wrote a conciliatory letter to Perkins that concluded: "I shall always think of you and feel about you the way it was that Fourth of July day three years ago when you met me at the boat, and we went out on the cafe on the river and had a drink and later went on top of the tall building, and all the strangeness and the glory and the power of life and of the city was below."
