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About
The story of the legendary Random House founder, whose seemingly charmed life at the apogee of the American Century featured an epic cast and left an enduring cultural legacy
At midcentury, everyone knew Bennett Cerf: witty, beloved, middle-aged panelist on What's My Line?, whom TV brought into America's homes each week. They didn't know the handsome, driven young man of the 1920s who'd vowed to become a great publisher, and a decade later, was. By then, he'd signed Eugene O'Neill, Gertrude Stein, William Faulkner, and had fought the landmark censorship case that gave Americans the freedom to read James Joyce's Ulysses.
With his best friend and lifelong business partner Donald Klopfer, and other young Jewish entrepreneurs like the Knopfs and Simon & Schuster, Cerf remade the book business: what was published, and how. In 1925, he and Klopfer had bought the Modern Library and turned it into an institution, then founded Random House, which eventually became a home to Truman Capote, Ralph Ellison, Ayn Rand, Dr. Seuss, Toni Morrison, and many more.
Even before TV, Cerf was a bestselling author and columnist as well as publisher; the show super-charged his celebrity. A brilliant social networker and major influencer before such terms existed, he connected books-Broadway-TV-Hollywood-politics. A fervent democratizer, he published "high," "low," and wide, and from the roaring twenties to the swinging sixties collected an incredible array of friends, having a fabulous time along the way.
For four decades, Gayle Feldman has reported on publishing for Publishers Weekly, The New York Times, The Bookseller, and others. Using new and deeply researched material from 200 interviews and many archives, she recalls Bennett Cerf to vibrant life, bringing booklovers into his world and time, and finally giving a true American original his due. Gayle Feldman has written features and reviews on books for The New York Times, The Nation, and others, and her personal essays have appeared in The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, The Philadelphia Inquirer, and The Times of London. Since 1999, she has been New York correspondent of The Bookseller, reporting on and analyzing the American publishing industry. She is the author of the memoir You Don't Have to Be Your Mother, and she was awarded a Pew-funded National Arts Journalism Program fellowship at Columbia University through which she published the monograph Best and Worst of Times: The Changing Business of Trade Books. She has appeared on the PBS NewsHour, NPR's On the Media, and her study was quoted in the NEA's Reading at Risk, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and more.
At midcentury, everyone knew Bennett Cerf: witty, beloved, middle-aged panelist on What's My Line?, whom TV brought into America's homes each week. They didn't know the handsome, driven young man of the 1920s who'd vowed to become a great publisher, and a decade later, was. By then, he'd signed Eugene O'Neill, Gertrude Stein, William Faulkner, and had fought the landmark censorship case that gave Americans the freedom to read James Joyce's Ulysses.
With his best friend and lifelong business partner Donald Klopfer, and other young Jewish entrepreneurs like the Knopfs and Simon & Schuster, Cerf remade the book business: what was published, and how. In 1925, he and Klopfer had bought the Modern Library and turned it into an institution, then founded Random House, which eventually became a home to Truman Capote, Ralph Ellison, Ayn Rand, Dr. Seuss, Toni Morrison, and many more.
Even before TV, Cerf was a bestselling author and columnist as well as publisher; the show super-charged his celebrity. A brilliant social networker and major influencer before such terms existed, he connected books-Broadway-TV-Hollywood-politics. A fervent democratizer, he published "high," "low," and wide, and from the roaring twenties to the swinging sixties collected an incredible array of friends, having a fabulous time along the way.
For four decades, Gayle Feldman has reported on publishing for Publishers Weekly, The New York Times, The Bookseller, and others. Using new and deeply researched material from 200 interviews and many archives, she recalls Bennett Cerf to vibrant life, bringing booklovers into his world and time, and finally giving a true American original his due. Gayle Feldman has written features and reviews on books for The New York Times, The Nation, and others, and her personal essays have appeared in The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, The Philadelphia Inquirer, and The Times of London. Since 1999, she has been New York correspondent of The Bookseller, reporting on and analyzing the American publishing industry. She is the author of the memoir You Don't Have to Be Your Mother, and she was awarded a Pew-funded National Arts Journalism Program fellowship at Columbia University through which she published the monograph Best and Worst of Times: The Changing Business of Trade Books. She has appeared on the PBS NewsHour, NPR's On the Media, and her study was quoted in the NEA's Reading at Risk, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and more.