In a fond tribute, Maraniss, who worked with her for decades, said he never knew exactly how old she was. Like Perkins, Mayhew befriended her authors but remained a somewhat mysterious figure. Mayhew also championed and planned five-volume biography of Lincoln by Sidney Blumenthal as well as a book about Lincoln and the press by Harold Holzer. With her guidance, Kearns-Goodwin wrote masterful and popular tomes about the presidency, including the Pulitzer-winner No Ordinary Time and Team of Rivals, which won the Lincoln Prize. and with Diane McWhorter on her portrait of Birmingham, Alabama, Carry Me Home. She worked with Taylor Branch on his multi-volume biography of Martin Luther King Jr. Authors, often chasing the biggest cash advances, rarely stay loyal to one editor over the course of a career, as Perkins’ retinue did.Ĭivil rights was a passion, as was Abraham Lincoln. Editors these days jump from publishing house to house, and some don’t even really edit. There have not been many modern versions of Perkins. Though hardly known outside the insular New York publishing world, Perkins has long been celebrated as “an editor of genius” (also the title of his biography), the unseen hand behind a literary canon. Their books won Pulitzer Prizes and sold millions of copies.

The manuscript was what became The Great Gatsby, one of many classics Perkins edited from a roster including, besides Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Thomas Wolfe, and Marjorie Kinnon Rawlings. Scott Fitzgerald from the legendary editor, Max Perkins, of the venerable publishing house Charles Scribner’s Sons. Such a moment came in the fall of 1924, when a letter arrived for F. So, imagine the delight of a young writer when he heard his editor’s assessment of his latest work: “I think the novel is a wonder.” For most authors, waiting for an editor’s reaction to a first draft of a new book is akin to torture.

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