The hordes of young people who still aspire to working in the publishing industry have dreams that look a lot like the professional life lived by Bob Gottlieb.  Over several decades working at Knopf and Simon & Schuster, Gottlieb shaped the books, careers, and occasionally the lives of many writers.  Some, such as Joseph Heller, Toni Morrison, Edna O’Brien, and John Le Carré, were literary heavyweights.  Others were stars of a different kind: Katherine Hepburn, Lauren Bacall, and Bill Clinton, for example.

Avid Reader, Gottlieb’s autobiography, manages to avoid the gossipy character and self-satisfied tone of many memoirs of the publishing industry.  In part, that’s because he realizes how fortunate he was in his choice of career and is endearingly modest about his achievements.  His mantra, that it’s the authors and the books that matter, tends to underplay the real contribution he made to some wonderful books, a contribution most of his admiring authors were more than happy to acknowledge.

I would have liked more detail about the process of editing and Gottlieb’s approach to it.  He was (and still is) an extremely accomplished editor.  Avid Reader, entertaining and informative as it is, never quite explains the “secret sauce”.