An Evening with Gayle Feldman in conversation with Don Morrison

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At midcentury, Bennett Cerf was a household name—witty, widely-beloved, fun-loving, and a familiar face each week as a panelist on What’s My Line? But before television made him a national personality, Cerf was a visionary force who transformed publishing in America.
In her landmark biography, NOTHING RANDOM: Bennett Cerf and the Publishing House He Built (Random House hardcover; On Sale: 1/13/26), Gayle Feldman reveals the driven, paradoxical young man who vowed to become a great publisher—and did. Over two decades in the making, and drawing on more than 200 interviews, previously unavailable private letters, and extensive archival research, Feldman brings Cerf’s story vividly to life.
Cerf, along with his business partner Donald Klopfer, purchased the Modern Library in 1925. At the time, the Modern Library was a struggling imprint of Boni & Liveright, and Cerf and Klopfer transformed it into a profitable, widely recognized brand. From that foundation, they went on to establish Random House in 1927, reshaping not only what America read, but how books were published, marketed, and celebrated. From Eugene O’Neill, Gertrude Stein, and William Faulkner to Truman Capote, Ralph Ellison, Ayn Rand, Philip Roth, and Dr. Seuss, Cerf cultivated voices that defined modern literature. He also fought—and won—the landmark censorship case that granted Americans the right to read James Joyce’s Ulysses.
Bennett Cerf’s life was a front-row seat on the American Century. A publishing titan and cultural connector, Cerf blurred the lines between books, Broadway, television, Hollywood, and politics. He was a bestselling author, a savvy networker before the word existed, and a democratizer of taste—championing both the highbrow and the popular, while collecting an extraordinary circle of friends from George Gershwin to Frank Sinatra and having a wonderful time along the way.
In her Prologue, Feldman captures the extraordinary send-off at Cerf’s 1971 funeral—where William Styron, Eudora Welty, John Hersey, and James Michener shared memories, and Broadway voices filled the hall. More than 600 mourners gathered to pay tribute to a man who left an indelible mark on American culture.
With wit, rigor, and fresh revelations, NOTHING RANDOM recalls a life lived at full tilt, and a publisher who left the world of books larger than he found it.

Gayle Feldman has written for Publishers Weekly for forty years, and since 1999 has been U.S. correspondent for The Bookseller, where she analyzes the American book business for U.K. readers. She has also contributed to The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Times of London, The Nation, The Daily Beast, and other publications. She is the author of the cancer memoir You Don’t Have to Be Your Mother (W.W. Norton) and was awarded a National Arts Journalism Program fellowship at Columbia University, through which she published Best and Worst of Times: The Changing Business of Trade Books. The National Endowment for the Humanities has supported her work on Nothing Random with a Public Scholar award. Feldman lives in New York City.New boost

Donald Morrison is a columnist and advisory board chair at the Berkshire Eagle in western Massachusetts. His writings also appear on Substack and in Miami Today. He is a former magazine editor (Time, Entertainment Weekly), author ("The Death of French Culture," "How Obama Lost America") and university lecturer (NYU, Sciences Po, Tsinghua University). He lives in Miami, Paris and the Berkshires.

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