Maxwell Perkins
Based on Wikipedia: Maxwell Perkins
In the history of American literature, there's a peculiar phenomenon: some of the most celebrated novels of the twentieth century might never have existed—or would have existed in radically different, possibly inferior forms—if not for a man whose name appears nowhere on their covers. While Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Wolfe became household names, their editor remained largely invisible to the reading public, quietly shaping the words that would define an era.
Maxwell Perkins didn't write a single famous sentence. But he recognized genius when others couldn't see it, and he had the patience to coax it into its final form.
The Unlikely Literary Kingmaker
William Maxwell Evarts Perkins—Max to everyone who knew him—was born in New York City in 1884 into a family of considerable pedigree. His maternal grandfather was William M. Evarts, a titan of American law who had served as Secretary of State under Rutherford B. Hayes and defended President Andrew Johnson during his impeachment trial. Young Max grew up in Plainfield, New Jersey, attended the prestigious St. Paul's School in New Hampshire, and graduated from Harvard in 1907.
Here's where the story takes an unexpected turn. Perkins majored in economics, not literature. He seemed destined for a conventional professional path. Yet at Harvard, he studied under Charles Townsend Copeland, a legendary writing professor known affectionately as "Copey," whose influence would redirect Perkins's entire life.
After graduation, Perkins worked as a reporter for The New York Times. In 1910, he joined Charles Scribner's Sons—one of America's most venerable publishing houses—as an advertising manager. It was, on paper, a respectable position at a respectable firm. But Scribner's at that time was something of a literary museum, publishing established authors like Henry James, Edith Wharton, and John Galsworthy. These were writers whose reputations were already secure, whose styles belonged to the previous century.
Perkins wanted something different. He wanted the future.
The Discovery That Changed Everything
In 1919, a manuscript landed on Perkins's desk with the unpromising title "The Romantic Egotist." It was written by a young Princeton dropout named F. Scott Fitzgerald who had spent the war years in an Alabama training camp, fallen in love with a Southern belle named Zelda Sayre, and poured his experiences into a novel that nobody at Scribner's liked.
Nobody except Perkins.
The manuscript was rejected—Scribner's wasn't ready to take a chance on this brash young voice. But Perkins saw something in those pages that his colleagues missed. He worked with Fitzgerald to revise and reshape the novel, guiding the young author through draft after draft until the book finally earned acceptance.
When "This Side of Paradise" appeared in 1920, it announced not just a new author but a new era. The novel captured the spirit of young postwar America—its restlessness, its hedonism, its peculiar mixture of cynicism and romanticism—and made Fitzgerald famous virtually overnight. More importantly for literary history, it established Perkins as something unprecedented: an editor who didn't just accept or reject manuscripts but actively discovered and developed talent.
What Made Perkins Different
To understand what Perkins brought to publishing, you have to understand what editing meant before him. In the early twentieth century, book editors were essentially gatekeepers. They evaluated manuscripts, negotiated contracts, and shepherded books through production. They were administrators, not collaborators. The idea that an editor might work intimately with a writer to shape a book's content—that an editor might be something like a creative partner—was largely foreign to the industry.
Perkins changed that. He read manuscripts not to judge them but to understand them. He could see what a book was trying to be, often more clearly than the author could, and he had the diplomatic skill to guide writers toward their own best intentions without imposing his vision on theirs.
The novelist Vance Bourjaily, one of Perkins's later discoveries, described him as having an "infallible sense of structure." Perkins could look at a sprawling, chaotic manuscript and identify its hidden architecture—the bones beneath the flesh. He never pretended to be an artist himself. His genius was in service of other people's genius.
He was also, by all accounts, extraordinarily kind. In an industry notorious for its sharp elbows and sharper tongues, Perkins treated writers with courtesy and genuine affection. He became not just their editor but their friend, their confessor, their banker in times of crisis. When Fitzgerald's alcoholism and extravagance left him perpetually broke, Perkins arranged advances and loans. When writers faced personal catastrophes, Perkins was there.
The Hemingway Connection
Fitzgerald, grateful for his own discovery, introduced Perkins to another young American writer living as an expatriate in Paris. Ernest Hemingway had published some short stories and a small novel with a different press, but he was looking for a major publisher who could launch his career properly.
In 1926, Scribner's published "The Sun Also Rises," Hemingway's novel about disillusioned Americans and British expatriates drinking and brawling their way across Spain. The book's frank language and sexual content alarmed the traditionalists at Scribner's—this was, after all, a conservative house with a reputation to protect—but Perkins fought for it. He understood that Hemingway's spare, direct prose represented something genuinely new in American fiction, and he wasn't about to let corporate timidity silence that voice.
Three years later, "A Farewell to Arms" topped the bestseller lists and silenced whatever remaining doubts Perkins's colleagues harbored about his editorial judgment. Hemingway would go on to become the most influential American prose stylist of the century, and his relationship with Perkins—more straightforward than his bond with Fitzgerald—would last until the editor's death.
The Impossible Challenge of Thomas Wolfe
If Fitzgerald tested Perkins's patience and Hemingway tested his courage, Thomas Wolfe tested the very limits of what editing could accomplish.
Wolfe was a giant of a man—six foot six, with appetites to match—and he wrote the way he lived: excessively, voluminously, without restraint. He would produce thousands of pages of autobiographical prose, every sentence of which he considered precious and inviolable. The idea of cutting his work was physically painful to him.
When Wolfe's first novel arrived at Scribner's, it was a mountain of paper. Perkins recognized its power—Wolfe had an authentic lyrical gift, a capacity to capture the texture of American life with passionate intensity—but he also recognized that no publisher could print a book of such length. What followed was, in Perkins's own words, a "tremendous struggle."
Perkins convinced Wolfe to cut ninety thousand words from "Look Homeward, Angel." To put that in perspective, ninety thousand words is roughly the length of a substantial novel in itself. Wolfe agonized over every deletion, but the book that emerged in 1929 was a critical success and established him as a major voice in American letters.
The next book was even harder. "Of Time and the River" took two years to wrestle into publishable form, with Perkins constantly fighting to hold the line on length while Wolfe kept adding more pages. It was published in 1935, and critics praised it, but the experience left both men exhausted.
Then something soured. Wolfe began to resent the widespread perception that he owed his success to his editor. Critics sometimes suggested that Perkins had essentially written Wolfe's books for him—a charge that infuriated Wolfe and wasn't entirely fair to either man. Wolfe left Scribner's after a series of bitter fights.
Yet when Wolfe died suddenly in 1938, at only thirty-seven years old, Perkins served as his literary executor. Wolfe had named Perkins his closest friend. Their conflict, it turned out, had been a family quarrel—passionate precisely because the bond was so deep.
The Full Roster
Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Wolfe remain the names most associated with Perkins, but his influence extended far beyond this famous triumvirate. He was the first to publish J.P. Marquand, whose satirical novels of Boston society would earn a Pulitzer Prize. He discovered Erskine Caldwell, whose gritty depictions of Southern poverty scandalized and fascinated readers. He championed Ring Lardner, the sportswriter-turned-fiction-writer, convincing both Lardner and the reading public that his work deserved serious literary attention.
Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings came to Perkins with stories about rural Florida, and it was his specific suggestions that led her to write "The Yearling"—a novel about a boy and his pet deer that became a beloved classic and won the 1939 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
In his final years, Perkins made two more remarkable discoveries. Alan Paton's "Cry, the Beloved Country," a devastating portrait of South Africa under apartheid, appeared in 1946 and became one of the most influential novels of the civil rights era. And in 1945, a young veteran named James Jones approached Perkins with an autobiographical manuscript. Perkins saw its potential but also its problems; he convinced Jones to abandon that project and begin something new. The result, "From Here to Eternity," would become a landmark novel about the American military—though Perkins didn't live to see its publication in 1951.
His final discovery was perhaps his most unusual. Marguerite Young came to him in 1947 with just forty pages of a novel she called "Miss MacIntosh, My Darling." Perkins saw enough promise in those pages to sign a contract. Young would spend the next eighteen years finishing the book, which finally appeared in 1965 as a 1,200-page experimental epic. By then, Perkins had been dead for nearly two decades, but his faith in Young's vision had set the project in motion.
The Ring Lardner Case
The story of Ring Lardner illustrates something essential about Perkins's approach to editing. Lardner was famous as a syndicated newspaper columnist, a humorist who wrote about sports and American life with a sardonic wit. Several collections of his work had been published, and all had failed commercially. Lardner himself didn't believe his writing was worth serious attention—he saw himself as an entertainer, not an artist.
Perkins disagreed. He saw in Lardner's seemingly casual prose a precise ear for American speech, a devastating eye for American pretension, and a genuine literary sensibility hiding behind the jokes. He coaxed Lardner into letting him assemble one more collection under the title "How To Write Short Stories."
The title was a joke—a parody of the how-to books that cluttered bookshops—and Lardner wrote ironic "introductions" to each story that mocked the conventions of literary criticism. But the stories themselves were the real thing: sharp, sad, funny, and true. The book sold well, and the excellent reviews established Lardner as a genuine literary figure rather than just a popular entertainer.
That Lardner has any reputation at all today is largely because Perkins believed in him more than Lardner believed in himself.
The Personal Cost
Perkins married Louise Saunders in 1910, and together they had five daughters. By all accounts, he was devoted to his family, though his work demanded enormous amounts of his time and emotional energy. He maintained homes in New Canaan, Connecticut, and Windsor, Vermont—the latter inherited through his mother's family, who had purchased it back in the 1820s.
His dedication to his writers was total and sometimes exhausting. He spent endless hours with Wolfe, talking through structure and cuts. He listened to Fitzgerald's complaints and Hemingway's boasts. He advanced money to writers who never paid it back. He gave himself fully to the work of others.
Perhaps inevitably, this took its toll. Perkins's health began failing in his final years. On June 17, 1947, he died of pneumonia in Stamford, Connecticut. He was sixty-two years old.
The Legacy
Hemingway dedicated "The Old Man and the Sea" to Perkins's memory when the novella appeared in 1952. It was a fitting tribute—the book would win the Pulitzer Prize and help secure Hemingway's Nobel Prize in Literature two years later. The dedication ensured that readers who might never have heard of Maxwell Perkins would at least encounter his name.
Scholar Matthew Bruccoli called Perkins "the most widely known literary editor of American literature." This might seem like a paradox—what does it mean to be famous as an editor?—but it captures something real about Perkins's achievement. He invented a role that didn't exist before him: the author's editor, the creative collaborator who works behind the scenes to help writers realize their visions.
Today, every publishing house has editors who work closely with authors on their manuscripts. This is so standard that we take it for granted. But someone had to be first, and that someone was Max Perkins.
The Houses That Remember
Perkins's New Canaan home is now on the National Register of Historic Places. But perhaps more fitting is what happened to his Vermont house. After staying in the family until 2005, it was restored and reopened as the Snapdragon Inn, which now houses the Maxwell Perkins Library—a collection of items associated with Perkins and his extended family.
The legacy continues through his descendants. His granddaughter Jenny King Phillips, a documentary filmmaker, helped lead the restoration of Ernest Hemingway's home in Cuba. Another grandson, Maxwell E.P. King, became editor of The Philadelphia Inquirer and later wrote an acclaimed biography of Fred Rogers, the beloved children's television host. The literary and cultural interests that defined Perkins's life clearly passed to subsequent generations.
Colin Firth portrayed Perkins in the 2016 film "Genius," based on A. Scott Berg's biography "Max Perkins: Editor of Genius." Malcolm McDowell played him in the 1983 film "Cross Creek," about his relationship with Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings. That two major actors have brought him to screen suggests how compelling his story remains—the quiet man who helped loud talents find their voices.
What Editing Meant to Him
Perkins never sought the spotlight. He didn't write memoirs or give many interviews. His editorial papers, now housed at Princeton University, reveal a man more interested in other people's words than in his own.
But his letters have been collected in several volumes, including his correspondence with Fitzgerald, with Hemingway, and with his wife and daughters. These reveal a man of deep feeling and careful thought—someone who understood that great books require not just talented writers but patient, perceptive readers who can see what the book is trying to become and help it get there.
In an era when publishers increasingly treat books as products and editors are often stretched too thin to provide meaningful guidance, Perkins stands as a reminder of what the editor-author relationship can be at its best: a partnership in service of art.
He never pretended to be an artist himself. But the art he helped create—the novels that defined American literature in the Jazz Age and the Depression, the books that still appear on syllabi and bestseller lists nearly a century later—that art bears his invisible fingerprints on every page.