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Robert Gottlieb

Robert Adams Gottlieb (April 29, 1931 – June 14, 2023) was an American writer and editor. He was the editor-in-chief of Simon & Schuster, Alfred A. Knopf, and The New Yorker.

Early life and education[edit]

Robert Gottlieb was born in 1931 to a Jewish family^[2]inManhattan, New York City, where he grew up on the Upper West Side.^[3] His middle name was given to him in honor of his uncle, Arthur Adams, who is now known to have been a Soviet spy.^[4]

Gottlieb attended the Birch Wathen School and graduated from Columbia University in 1952, Phi Beta Kappa.^[3] He received a graduate degree from Cambridge University in 1954.^[3]

Career[edit]

Gottlieb joined Simon & Schuster in 1955 as an editorial assistant to Jack Goodman, the editor-in-chief.^[5] Within ten years he himself became the editor-in-chief.^[6] At that publisher, Gottlieb's most notable discovery, which he edited, was Catch-22, by the then-unknown Joseph Heller.^[7] It was Gottlieb who suggested the number 22 for the title instead of the original 18; Leon Uris's Mila 18 was to be published around the same time.^[8]

In 1968, Gottlieb, along with Nina Bourne and Anthony Schulte, moved to Alfred A. Knopf as editor-in-chief; soon after he became president. He left in 1987 to succeed William Shawn as editor of The New Yorker, staying in that position until 1992. After his departure from The New Yorker, Gottlieb returned to Alfred A. Knopf as editor ex officio.^[6]

Gottlieb was a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, and The New York Times Book Review, and had been the dance critic for The New York Observer since 1999. He is the author of biographies of George Balanchine, Sarah Bernhardt, and the family of Charles Dickens, as well as of a collection of his critical essays. A Certain Style, Gottlieb's lavishly illustrated book about the plastic handbags of which he was a major collector, was published by Alfred A. Knopf. He edited three major anthologies: Reading Jazz, Reading Dance, and (with Robert Kimball) Reading Lyrics.^[9][10]

Gottlieb suffered some ignominy for rejecting A Confederacy of DuncesbyJohn Kennedy Toole, a book that later won the Pulitzer Prize when it was published posthumously eleven years after the author's death by suicide.^[11]

Gottlieb's autobiography, Avid Reader: A Life, was published in September 2016.^[12]

Editing[edit]

Gottlieb edited novels by John Cheever, Doris Lessing, Chaim Potok, Charles Portis, Salman Rushdie, John Gardner, Len Deighton, John le Carré, Ray Bradbury, Elia Kazan, Margaret Drabble, Michael Crichton, Mordecai Richler, and Toni Morrison, and non-fiction books by Bill Clinton, Janet Malcolm, Katharine Graham, Nora Ephron, Katharine Hepburn, Barbara Tuchman, Jessica Mitford, Robert Caro, Antonia Fraser, Lauren Bacall, Liv Ullmann, Paul Simon, Bob Dylan, Bruno Bettelheim, Carl Schorske, and many others.^[13] In the documentary film Turn Every Page, Gottlieb estimated that he had edited between 600 and 700 books.

In a 1994 interview with The Paris Review, Gottlieb described his need to "surrender" to a book. "The more you have surrendered," he said, "the more jarring its errors appear. I read a manuscript very quickly, the moment I get it. I usually won't use a pencil the first time through because I'm just reading for impressions. When I read the end, I'll call the writer and say, I think it's very fine (or whatever), but I think there are problems here and here. At that point I don't know why I think that—I just think it. Then I go back and read the manuscript again, more slowly, and I find and mark the places where I had negative reactions to try to figure out what's wrong. The second time through I think about solutions—maybe this needs expanding, maybe there's too much of this so it's blurring that."^[14]

Dance[edit]

For many years, Gottlieb was associated with the New York City Ballet, serving as a member of its board of directors.^[15] He published many books by people from the dance world, including Mikhail Baryshnikov and Margot Fonteyn.^[16] He was also a member of the Board of Trustees of the Miami City Ballet.^[17]

Personal life[edit]

He was the son of Charles Gottlieb, a lawyer, and Martha (née Keen), a teacher.^[18] Gottlieb married Muriel Higgins in 1952; they had one child, Roger. In 1969, Gottlieb married Maria Tucci, an actress whose father, the novelist Niccolò Tucci, was one of Gottlieb's writers.^[19] They had two children: Lizzie Gottlieb, a film director, and Nicholas (Nicky), who is the subject of one of his sister's documentary films, Today's Man.^[20] He had residences in Manhattan, Miami, and Paris.^[3]

On June 14, 2023, Gottlieb died in a hospital in Manhattan, at the age of 92.^[21]

Legacy[edit]

In 2022, a documentary was released about the collaborations of Gottlieb and writer Robert Caro titled Turn Every Page.^[22] The film was directed by Gottlieb's daughter, Lizzie Gottlieb.^[23] The title comes from advice that former Newsday editor Alan Hathway had given to Caro as a young reporter on his first investigative assignment: "Hathway looked at me for what I remember as a very long time… 'Just remember,' he said. 'Turn every page. Never assume anything. Turn every goddamn page.'"^[24]

Bibliography[edit]

This list is incomplete; you can help by adding missing items. (October 2014)

Nonfiction books[edit]

• A Certain Style: The Art of the Plastic Handbag 1949–1959 (1988) (Knopf)^[25]
• Forcing the Spring: The Transformation of the American Environmental Movement (1993) (Island Press)^[26]
• Reading Jazz: A Gathering of Autobiography, Reportage, and Criticism from 1919 to Now (1996) (Pantheon Books)
• George Balanchine: The Ballet Maker (2004) (Atlas Books/Harper Collins)^[27]
• Sarah: The Life of Sarah Bernhardt (2010) (Yale University Press)^[28]
• Food Justice (2010) (MIT Press)
• Lives and Letters (2011) (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)^[29]
• Great Expectations: The Sons and Daughters of Charles Dickens (2012) (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)^[30]
• Avid Reader: A Life (2016) (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)^[31]
• Near-Death Experiences . . . and Others (2018) (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)^[32]
• Garbo (2021) (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)^[33]

Other nonfiction[edit]

• Gottlieb, Robert (January 7, 2013). "A Critic at Large: Man of Letters". The New Yorker. Vol. 88, no. 42. pp. 71–76.^[34]

References[edit]

Further reading[edit]

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• Booklist
  • October 15, 1996, Bonnie Smothers, review of Reading Jazz: A Gathering of Autobiography, Reportage, and Criticism from 1919 to Now, p. 395
  • November 1, 2008, Donna Seaman, review of Reading Dance: A Gathering of Memoirs, Reportage, Criticism, Profiles, Interviews, and Some Uncategorizable Extras, p. 20
  • May 1, 2011, Donna Seaman, review of Lives and Letters, p. 54.
• Choice: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries
  • May 2001, Review J. Farrington, review of Reading Lyrics, p. 1604
  • May 2005, S. E. Friedler, review of George Balanchine: The Ballet Maker, p. 1600
  • April 2009, T. K. Hagood, review of Reading Dance, p. 1511
  • April 2011, D. B. Wilmeth, review of Sarah: The Life of Sarah Bernhardt, p. 1485
• Commonweal, March 28, 1997, Frank McConnell, review of Reading Jazz, p. 23
• Interview, December 1996, Ingrid Sischy, "Jazz Writ Large," pp. 34–36
• Library Journal
• September 15, 1991, Lesley Jorbin, review of The Journals of John Cheever, p. 76
  • November 1, 1996, Michael Colby, review of Reading Jazz, p. 70
  • August 2000, Barry Zaslow, review of Reading Lyrics, p. 107
  • October 1, 2008, Barbara Kundanis, review of Reading Dance, p. 72
  • June 1, 2011, David Keymer, review of Lives and Letters, p. 98
• New York Times
  • July 1, 1992, Deirdre Carmody, "Tina Brown to Take Over at The New Yorker"
  • December 9, 1992, Eric Pace, "William Shawn, 85, Is Dead"
• New York Times Book Review
  • December 22, 1996, Peter Keepnews, review of Reading Jazz
  • September 17, 2010, Emma Brockes, review of Sarah
• The Observer (London, England), October 24, 2010, Olivia Laing, review of Sarah
• The Telegraph (London, England), October 22, 2010, Claudia FitzHerbert, review of Sarah.

External links[edit]

• AppearancesonC-SPAN