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.
Gottlieb joined Simon & Schuster in 1955 as an editorial assistant to Jack Goodman, the editorial director.The Paris Review Interviews, Vol. 1, p. 337, New York: Picador, 2006. At Simon & Schuster, Gottlieb became editorial director within five years and drew attention for the publishing phenomenon of Catch-22.
In 1968, Gottlieb—along with advertising and marketing executives 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 from 1999 until 2020. While at Simon & Schuster and Knopf, he notably edited books by Joseph Heller, Jessica Mitford, Lauren Bacall, Salman Rushdie, Toni Morrison, John le Carré, and Robert Caro, among others.
Early life and education Robert Gottlieb was born in 1931 to a Jewish familyReimer, Susan (December 16, 2012), "The Good Old Days Of The Future Of Publishing", Times of Israel. 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.Avid Reader: A Life, p. 313. While a child at summer camp, Gottlieb's bookish tendencies led him to a friendship with E.L. Doctorow.
Gottlieb attended the Birch Wathen School and graduated from Columbia University in 1952, Phi Beta Kappa, and was a member of the Philolexian Society. He received a graduate degree from Cambridge University in 1954.
Simon & Schuster (1955-1968) Gottlieb began his career in publishing as the editorial assistant to Simon & Schuster editorial director, Jack Goodman. Gottlieb, who had been working seasonally at Macy's and translating from French on a freelance basis, had actively looked for a publishing career since leaving Cambridge.Gottlieb, Robert, Avid Reader: A Life, pg. 30-36 In his memoir, he self-deprecatingly wrote that the books Simon & Schuster published were below his "exquisite literary standards" at that point, but his need for an opening into publishing made him want to take the interview.
True to fact, the company was not known for its prestige, as much as its commercial success. The first book published by the firm was famously a book of crosswords, which sold extremely well; the company also first established the children's book series Little Golden Books, which published the best-selling children's book for decades, The Poky Little Puppy, in 1942.
Two years after his start at Simon & Schuster, Gottlieb's boss Jack Goodman died suddenly in August 1957. Around Gottlieb's arrival, more than 5 different executives had either died or left—an exodus that included founder Richard Simon, who retired in late 1957. With the absence of Goodman, Simon, and senior editor Albert Leventhal, the firm's business chief named Gottlieb editorial director in 1959. In his memoir, Gottlieb describes the time of his leadership a "peculiarly divided" time for the company, based on differences between the old guard and the new.Gottlieb, Robert, Avid Reader: A Life, pg. 74
An early success for Gottlieb came with Rona Jaffe's The Best of Everything (1958), which film producer Jerry Wald had commissioned—in an agreement with Goodman—before it was finished.Gottlieb, Robert, Avid Reader: A Life, pg. 50 The book's path to publication straddled Goodman's death, so Gottlieb naturally retained the responsibility for it as Goodman's assistant. The book became a film in 1959, which featured Joan Crawford and received mixed reviews.
Catch-22 Gottlieb's first notable discovery at Simon & Schuster was Catch-22, by the then-unknown Joseph Heller. Heller's literary agent Candida Donadio sent multiple publishing houses a 75-page manuscript of the unfinished novel in the mid-1950s. Multiple periodicals and publishers found it confusing, according to Heller's biographer.Daugherty, Tracy, Just One Catch: A Biography of Joseph Heller, pg. 180
Gottlieb and Thomas Guinzburg from Viking Press both expressed interest in Heller's initial pages. Heller and Donadio went with Simon & Schuster, largely due to Gottlieb's zeal for the book.Daugherty, Tracy, Just One Catch: A Biography of Joseph Heller, pg. 208 Gottlieb was still junior at Simon & Schuster, but he overrode doubts from the founder's younger brother Henry Simon, who saw nothing in the book, and the more senior editors Peter Schwed and Justin Kaplan, who found the book overly repetitive.Daugherty, Tracy, Just One Catch: A Biography of Joseph Heller, pg. 210 Gottlieb did concede that the book needed extensive revisions to reconcile the comedy with the book's more searing qualities, but wrote in a 1958 report that it would provide the company prestige among "real admirers in certain literary sets."
Heller's initial completed draft of 1960 ran to 758 pages, typed.Daugherty, Tracy, Just One Catch: A Biography of Joseph Heller, pg. 214 Gottlieb, working with Heller and Simon & Schuster advertising representative Nina Bourne, cut the draft by around 200 pages.
When published in October 1961, more than a year after its initial deadline, the book received mixed reviews, with praise from Newsweek, but pause from Time. Daugherty, Tracy, Just One Catch: A Biography of Joseph Heller, pg. 224 Gottlieb and Bourne tried to engineer a positive review from the prestigious New York Times Book Review by demanding a young "with-it" reviewer, yet the review from Richard Stern dismissed the book as "emotional hodgepodge." Gottlieb and Bourne capitalized on the positive reviews from some publications and from famous writers— a group that included Harper Lee, Art Buchwald, and Nelson Algren, among others— by aggressively purchasing ads in the Times and other periodicals to display the praise.Daugherty, Tracy, Just One Catch: A Biography of Joseph Heller, pp. 227-229
Though the hardcover edition did not sell well enough to reach the Best Seller list, it did manage to run for six printings before Gottlieb sold the paperback rights to low-cost publisher Dell for $32,000.Daugherty, Tracy, Just One Catch: A Biography of Joseph Heller, pg. 236 Dell sold 800,000 copies by September 1962 and the combined book sales exceeded 1.1 million by April 1963, a year and a half after the initial publishing. In the late 1960s, after the positive experience of Catch-22, Heller followed Gottlieb to Knopf to publish a book version of his Broadway play, We Bombed in New Haven.
Name origin Originally titled Catch-18, Heller, Gottlieb and Donadio sensed a need to change the name so as not to compete with Leon Uris's then-upcoming war novel Mila 18. The book has competing narratives as to how it earned its titular number.
Donadio frequently claimed that the title was changed to 22 as a way to reference her birthday (October 22). Gottlieb vociferously disputed that narrative as a lie, claiming that he distinctly remembered calling Heller in the middle of the night to tell him that "22" was funnier than "18."Gottlieb, Robert, Avid Reader: A Life, pp. 60-61. Heller felt that the titular 22 may have derived from his offering to call the airplanes in the book "B-22s," after a legal team suggested that the military may object to usage of the name "B-25."Daugherty, Tracy, Just One Catch: A Biography of Joseph Heller, pg. 218
Later years, 1960-1968 Former editor and Simon & Schuster historian Peter Schwed notes that Gottlieb had some luck in the early 1960s in recognizing publishing potential where others did not. Gottlieb bought the American rights to publish R.F. Delderfield's A Horseman Riding By, which every American publisher, including Simon & Schuster, had declined to try to transfer to the U.S. With a publisher-favorable contract on the expectation that it wouldn't perform, the book and other Delderfield books eventually sold millions in the U.S.
Gottlieb also bought the rights to publish John Lennon's farce, In His Own Write, shortly before Beatlemania reached the United States. He originally ordered only 2,000 books from Tom Maschler of Jonathan Cape, but the band became more popular stateside soon after the deal. Ahead of the American publishing, Simon & Schuster rushed to print a first-run of 50,000 copies, which quickly sold out.
Journalist William Shirer began writing his best-selling popular history book, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich before Gottlieb's involvement in the company, working with editor Joseph Barnes. While Gottlieb was not the book's editor, he was in charge of its release by the 1960 publication date. Notably, he claims that he stopped a plan to split the book into two separately published volumes.Avid Reader, pg. 80 The hardcover went through 13 printings, selling 1 million copies within a year (though the majority were sold through the Book of the Month Club). Off of the hardcover sales, Gottlieb auctioned the paperback rights for $400,000 to Fawcett.
Jessica Mitford's The American Way of Death (1963)
In 1960, writer Jessica Mitford had become a minor celebrity after publishing a memoir of her aristocratic family, Hons and Rebels. She decided to use the attention to complete a book on the American funerary industry that she had researched on and off since 1958, after her husband, civil rights lawyer Robert Treuhaft, mentioned that his union clients' funeral expenses seemed to be rising.
The book was commissioned by Houghton Mifflin, her American publisher, on the strength of their previous collaboration. The publishers found the descriptions of embalming practices unseemly and worried about legal liabilities, but when Mitford's agent Candida Donadio—who had worked with Gottlieb on Catch-22—offered it to Gottlieb, he says he "jumped" to take advantage.Gottlieb, Robert, Avid Reader: A Life, pg. 58
The first print-run of 20,000 copies sold out on the first day of availability. The book became a phenomenon, with Mitford taking interviews on television and radio programs. The American Way of Death stayed on the best-seller list for one year, with some of it spent in the first spot. It was so influential that Robert F. Kennedy told Mitford that he initially chose the least ornate model for his brother's coffin, due to the extortionary practices she had documented.
Chaim Potok's The Chosen (1967) One of the larger achievements of Gottlieb's Simon & Schuster came out of Chaim Potok's book, The Chosen. Gottlieb writes in his memoir that, by the time he read the draft, the manuscript had been well-traveled amongst other publishers, without any interest.Gottlieb, Robert, Avid Reader: A Life, pg. 85-87
After reading and enjoying the novel, Gottlieb wrote that he was left with one impression: the 800-page manuscript was best suited as two completely separate novels. The second of the two novels, The Promise, was published by Knopf in 1969, a year after Gottlieb's move there. Though The Promise received poor reviews as the second of two halves—Time asked "how much more of the original manuscript is threatening us from Robert Gottlieb's desk drawer?"—The Chosen earned critical praise and significant readership.
Rejection of A Confederacy of Dunces 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. The editing process progressed over two years of back-and-forth letters starting from when Toole sent his manuscript, unsolicited, to Gottlieb in 1964.