Gayle Feldman on Bennett Cerf, with Jonathan Galassi

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. But they didn’t know that the handsome, driven, paradoxical young man of the 1920s had vowed to become a great publisher and, a decade later, was. By then, he’d signed Eugene O’Neill, Gertrude Stein, and 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 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, James Michener, and many others.

Feldman brings Bennett Cerf to vibrant life, drawing book lovers into his world, finally laying open the page on a quintessential American original.

Gayle Feldman has written for Publishers Weekly for forty years, including as a senior staff editor. Since 1999, as U.S. correspondent for The Bookseller, she has analyzed the American book business for U.K. readers. She has also contributed features, reviews, and essays 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, first published by W. W. Norton, and was awarded a NationalArts 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.

Jonathan Galassi is the chairman emeritus of Farrar, Straus and Giroux. He is the author of four books of poetry, including Left-handed, and has published translations of the Italian poets Giacomo Leopardi, Primo Levi, and Eugenio Montale. He lives in New York City and on Long Island.

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