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Robert Gottlieb, the inspired and eclectic literary editor whose brilliant career was launched with Joseph Heller’s „Catch-22“ and continued for decades with such Pulitzer Prize-winning classics as Toni Morrison’s „Beloved“ and Robert Caro’s „The Power Broker,“ has died at age 92.
Gottlieb died Wednesday of natural causes at a New York hospital, Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group announced. Caro, who had worked for decades with Gottlieb on his Lyndon Johnson biographies and was featured with him last year in the documentary „Turn Every Page,“ said in a statement that he had never worked with an editor so attuned to the writing process.
„From the day 52 years ago that we first looked at my pages together, Bob understood what I was trying to do and made it possible for me to take the time, and do the work, I needed to do,“ Caro said in a statement. „People talk to me about some of the triumphant moments Bob and I shared, but today I remember other moments, tough ones, and I remember how Bob was always, always, for half a century, there for me. He was a great friend, and today I mourn my friend with all my heart.“
Tall and assured, with wavy dark hair and dark-rimmed glasses, Gottlieb had one of the greatest runs of any editor after World War II and helped shape the modern publishing canon. His credits included fiction by future Nobel laureates Morrison, Doris Lessing and V.S. Naipaul; spy novels by John le Carré, essays by Nora Ephron, science thrillers by Michael Crichton and Caro’s nonfiction epics.
He also edited memoirs by Katharine Hepburn, Lauren Bacall and publisher Katharine Graham, whose „Personal History“ won a Pulitzer. Gottlieb so impressed Bill Clinton that the former president signed with Alfred A. Knopf in part for the chance to work with Gottlieb on his memoir „My Life.“
Uniquely well-read and unstuffy, he was the rare soul who would claim to have finished „War and Peace“ in a single weekend (some reports narrowed it to a single day) and also collected plastic handbags that filled shelves above his bed. Gottlieb was as open to „Miss Piggy’s Guide to Life“ as he was to the works of Chaim Potok. On his desk for decades was a bronze paperweight, given to him when he started in publishing, etched with the words „GIVE THE READER A BREAK.“
Gottlieb’s reputation was made during his time as editor-in-chief of Simon & Schuster and later Alfred A. Knopf, where in recent years he worked as an editor-at-large. But he also edited The New Yorker for five years before departing over „conceptual differences“ with publisher S.I. Newhouse and was himself an accomplished prose stylist. He wrote dance criticism for The New York Observer and book reviews for The New York Times. He wrote a short biography of George Balanchine, co-authored „A Certain Style: The Art of the Plastic Handbag, 1949-59,“ and edited well-regarded anthologies of jazz criticism and 20th century song lyrics. His memoir, „Avid Reader,“ came out in 2016.
He was married twice, the second time to actor Maria Tucci, and had three children. He was otherwise so absorbed in work — he was looking over early proofs of a Cynthia Ozick book while counting contractions for his pregnant wife — that the author Thomas Mallon summed up his life as a „busman’s holiday without any brakes.“
In „Turn Every Page,“ a joint biography of Caro and Gottlieb directed by the editor’s daughter, Lizzie Gottlieb, Robert Gottlieb referred to editing as „a service job.
