Nothing Random
Bennett Cerf and the Publishing House He Built
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
The story of the legendary Random House founder, whose seemingly charmed life at the apogee of the American Century afforded him a front-row seat to literary and cultural history in the making
“A stunning achievement . . . a sweeping intellectual history with a stunning cast of characters that reveals the inner struggles of a great publishing house.”—Kai Bird, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer
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 more.
Even before TV, Cerf was a bestselling author and columnist as well as publisher; the show super-charged his celebrity, bringing fame—but also criticism. A brilliant social networker and major influencer before such terms existed, he connected books to Broadway, TV, Hollywood, and politics. A fervent democratizer, he published “high,” “low,” and wide, and from the Roaring Twenties to the Swinging Sixties collected an incredible array of friends, from George Gershwin to Frank Sinatra, having a fabulous time along the way.
Using interviews with more than two hundred individuals, deeply researched archival material, and letters from private collections not previously available, this book brings Bennett Cerf to vibrant life, drawing book lovers into his world, finally laying open the page on a quintessential American original.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This cinematic biography of Random House founder Bennett Cerf from longtime PW writer Feldman (You Don't Have to Be Your Mother) teems with a star-studded cast including Truman Capote, James Joyce, Alfred Knopf, Ayn Rand, and Dick Simon. After studying journalism at Columbia University in the 1910s, Cerf joined the publisher Boni & Liveright, declaring after just three weeks that he hoped to "become one of the greatest publishers of the country." Armed with an inheritance, he and his friend Donald Klopfer took the first step toward this goal in 1925, purchasing the Modern Library imprint from Liveright. Two years later, they founded Random House, which, by the 1960s, became the preeminent book publisher in America. Feldman chronicles the duo's championing of Joyce's Ulysses, which helped put the house on the map, and Cerf's hiring of editors who would go on to make their own storied contributions to the field—Jason Epstein, Nan Talese, Albert Erskine, and Saxe Commins— to show Cerf was "a cultural force beloved by many" who shaped 20th-century publishing. Drawing on Cerf's personal archive, as well those of writers he worked with, and more than 200 interviews, Feldman paints a candid portrait of one of the giants of modern publishing, who emerges as a charming, humorous man who was open to "many worlds, high and low, mass and class" and committed to his authors. This is monumental.
