Robert Gottlieb

Robert Gottlieb
Robert Adams Gottlieb (April 29, 1931 – June 14, 2023) was an American writer and editor. He was the editor-in-chief of Simon & Schuster, Alfred A. Knopf, and The New Yorker.
Early life and education
Robert Gottlieb was born in 1931 to a Jewish family in Manhattan, New York City, where he grew up on the Upper West Side. His middle name was given to him in honor of his uncle, Arthur Adams, who is now known to have been a Soviet spy.
Gottlieb attended the Birch Wathen School and graduated from Columbia University in 1952, Phi Beta Kappa. He received a graduate degree from Cambridge University in 1954.
Career
Gottlieb joined Simon & Schuster in 1955 as an editorial assistant to Jack Goodman, the editor-in-chief. Within ten years he himself became the editor-in-chief. At that publisher, Gottlieb's most notable discovery, which he edited, was Catch-22, by the then-unknown Joseph Heller. It was Gottlieb who suggested the number 22 for the title instead of the original 18; Leon Uris's Mila 18 was to be published around the same time.
In 1968, Gottlieb, along with Nina Bourne and Anthony Schulte, moved to Alfred A. Knopf as editor-in-chief; soon after he became president. He left in 1987 to succeed William Shawn as editor of The New Yorker, staying in that position until 1992. After his departure from The New Yorker, Gottlieb returned to Alfred A. Knopf as editor ex officio.
Gottlieb was a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, and The New York Times Book Review, and had been the dance critic for The New York Observer since 1999. He is the author of biographies of George Balanchine, Sarah Bernhardt, and the family of Charles Dickens, as well as of a collection of his critical essays. A Certain Style, Gottlieb's lavishly illustrated book about the plastic handbags of which he was a major collector, was published by Alfred A. Knopf. He edited three major anthologies: Reading Jazz, Reading Dance, and (with Robert Kimball) Reading Lyrics.
Gottlieb suffered some ignominy for rejecting A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole, a book that later won the Pulitzer Prize when it was published posthumously eleven years after the author's death by suicide.
Gottlieb's autobiography, Avid Reader: A Life, was published in September 2016.
Editing
Gottlieb edited novels by John Cheever, Doris Lessing, Chaim Potok, Charles Portis, Salman Rushdie, John Gardner, Len Deighton, John le Carré, Ray Bradbury, Elia Kazan, Margaret Drabble, Michael Crichton, Mordecai Richler, and Toni Morrison, and non-fiction books by Bill Clinton, Janet Malcolm, Katharine Graham, Nora Ephron, Katharine Hepburn, Barbara Tuchman, Jessica Mitford, Robert Caro, Antonia Fraser, Lauren Bacall, Liv Ullmann, Paul Simon, Bob Dylan, Bruno Bettelheim, Carl Schorske, and many others. In the documentary film Turn Every Page, Gottlieb estimated that he had edited between 600 and 700 books.
In a 1994 interview with The Paris Review, Gottlieb described his need to "surrender" to a book. "The more you have surrendered," he said, "the more jarring its errors appear. I read a manuscript very quickly, the moment I get it. I usually won't use a pencil the first time through because I'm just reading for impressions. When I read the end, I'll call the writer and say, I think it's very fine (or whatever), but I think there are problems here and here. At that point I don't know why I think that—I just think it. Then I go back and read the manuscript again, more slowly, and I find and mark the places where I had negative reactions to try to figure out what's wrong. The second time through I think about solutions—maybe this needs expanding, maybe there's too much of this so it's blurring that."
Dance
For many years, Gottlieb was associated with the New York City Ballet, serving as a member of its board of directors. He published many books by people from the dance world, including Mikhail Baryshnikov and Margot Fonteyn. He was also a member of the Board of Trustees of the Miami City Ballet.
Personal
He was the son of Charles Gottlieb, a lawyer, and Martha (née Keen), a teacher. Gottlieb married Muriel Higgins in 1952; they had one child, Roger. In 1969, Gottlieb married Maria Tucci, an actress whose father, the novelist Niccolò Tucci, was one of Gottlieb's writers. They had two children: Lizzie Gottlieb, a film director, and Nicholas (Nicky), who is the subject of one of his sister's documentary films, Today's Man. He had residences in Manhattan, Miami, and Paris.
On June 14, 2023, Gottlieb died in a hospital in Manhattan, at the age of 92.
Legacy
In 2022, a documentary was released about the collaborations of Gottlieb and writer Robert Caro titled Turn Every Page. The film was directed by Gottlieb's daughter, Lizzie Gottlieb. The title comes from advice that former Newsday editor Alan Hathway had given to Caro as a young reporter on his first investigative assignment: "Hathway looked at me for what I remember as a very long time… 'Just remember,' he said. 'Turn every page. Never assume anything. Turn every goddamn page.
Bibliography
Nonfiction books
A Certain Style: The Art of the Plastic Handbag 1949–1959 (1988) (Knopf)
George Balanchine: The Ballet Maker (2004) (Atlas Books/Harper Collins)
Sarah: The Life of Sarah Bernhardt (2010) (Yale University Press)
Lives and Letters (2011) (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Great Expectations: The Sons and Daughters of Charles Dickens (2012) (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Avid Reader: A Life (2016) (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Near-Death Experiences . . . and Others (2018) (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Garbo (2021) (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Other nonfiction
References
Further reading
Booklist
October 15, 1996, Bonnie Smothers, review of Reading Jazz: A Gathering of Autobiography, Reportage, and Criticism from 1919 to Now, p. 395
November 1, 2008, Donna Seaman, review of Reading Dance: A Gathering of Memoirs, Reportage, Criticism, Profiles, Interviews, and Some Uncategorizable Extras, p. 20
May 1, 2011, Donna Seaman, review of Lives and Letters, p. 54.
Choice: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries
May 2001, Review J. Farrington, review of Reading Lyrics, p. 1604
May 2005, S. E. Friedler, review of George Balanchine: The Ballet Maker, p. 1600
April 2009, T. K. Hagood, review of Reading Dance, p. 1511
April 2011, D. B. Wilmeth, review of Sarah: The Life of Sarah Bernhardt, p. 1485
Commonweal, March 28, 1997, Frank McConnell, review of Reading Jazz, p. 23
Interview, December 1996, Ingrid Sischy, "Jazz Writ Large," pp. 34–36
Library Journal
September 15, 1991, Lesley Jorbin, review of The Journals of John Cheever, p. 76
November 1, 1996, Michael Colby, review of Reading Jazz, p. 70
August 2000, Barry Zaslow, review of Reading Lyrics, p. 107
October 1, 2008, Barbara Kundanis, review of Reading Dance, p. 72
June 1, 2011, David Keymer, review of Lives and Letters, p. 98
New York Times
July 1, 1992, Deirdre Carmody, "Tina Brown to Take Over at The New Yorker"
December 9, 1992, Eric Pace, "William Shawn, 85, Is Dead"
New York Times Book Review
December 22, 1996, Peter Keepnews, review of Reading Jazz
September 17, 2010, Emma Brockes, review of Sarah
The Observer (London, England), October 24, 2010, Olivia Laing, review of Sarah
The Telegraph (London, England), October 22, 2010, Claudia FitzHerbert, review of Sarah.
External links
1931 births
2023 deaths
20th-century American Jews
20th-century American male writers
20th-century American non-fiction writers
21st-century American Jews
21st-century American male writers
21st-century American non-fiction writers
American dance critics
American literary editors
American magazine editors
American male journalists
Catch-22
Columbia College (New York) alumni
Fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
Jewish American writers
Journalists from New York City
Writers from the Upper West Side
The New Yorker editors
The New Yorker people
Writers from Manhattan