As a young editor, Perkins had discovered F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and Thomas Wolfe, but he had done much more than that, Berg writes:
"Beginning with Fitzgerald and continuing with each new writer he took on, he slowly altered the traditional notion of the editor's role. He sought out authors who were not just safe,' con-ventional in style and bland in content but who spoke in a new voice about the new values of the postwar world. In this way, as an editor he did more than reflect the standards of his age; he consciously influenced and changed them by the new talents he published."
Among the other authors who move through Perkins' sometimes dysfunctional family of writers are Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, Taylor CaIdwell, Alan Paton, James Jones, Ring Lardner and Erskine Caidwell.
Berg's book is so compelling that you're likely to dip back into it now and then, and perhaps even reread it some day. Surely the ultimate compliment for a 512-page biography.
from Writer's Digest, October 2002
No comments:
Post a Comment