Max Perkins: Editor of Genius

The Trouble I’ve Seen,

James Jones, who was living in Illinois and inching ahead with From Here to Eternity.

Maxwell Perkins gave all his authors the feeling that he cared as much for their work as they did themselves.

Mrs. Boyd had recently told him of Wolfe’s being beaten almost to death at Munich’s Oktoberfest.

So, as in Death in the Afternoon, he writes beautifully, and then immediately turns it off with a flippant comment, or a deliberate obscenity.

Tom Wolfe.”

acquiescing in his ruin.”

If an author worried too much about plot, Max said, he might become “sort of muscle-bound,” whereas he must be flexible.

At one point he told Cowley that the man he would most like to resemble was Major General John Aaron Rawlins. According to the Dictionary of American Biography, Rawlins was “the most nearly indispensable” officer of General Grant’s staff. It was his job to keep Grant sober; edit his important papers and put them in final form; apply tact and persis