Max Perkins: The Legendary Scribner’s Editor
Perkins Handled Most of the New Wave of American Writers in the First Forty Years of the 20th Century…
Literary Editor, Max Perkins, was the man who made F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Thomas Wolfe, Marjorie Kinnin Rawlings, and so many more.
Every time Hemingway visited New York his first port of call was his publisher Charles Scribner’s & Sons — one of America’s most famous and prestigious publishing houses.
The company was based in a building of classical design on the corner of 48th Street and 5th Avenue. The ground floor, faced in shiny brass, housed the elegant Scribner Bookshop, which, in the words of John Hall Wheelock, the store’s manager in the 1930s (before he became an editor for the company) was a ‘Byzantine cathedral of books.’ Alongside the bookstore there was, as A. Scott Berg describes it, ‘an unobtrusive entrance, with, behind it, a vestibule which led to an elevator that clattered its way into the upper realms of the Scribner enterprise.
The second and third floors housed financial and business departments. Advertising was on the fourth floor. And on the fifth were the editorial rooms with bare…
