Max Perkins - The Editor Who Created Hemingway and Fitzgerald

While the story of American literature in the 20th Century usually centers on Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald, far fewer people know the editor who made both careers possible. His name was Max Perkins.

Where Fitzgerald and Hemingway were the voices, Perkins was the quiet force at Scribner's who pulled them out of droughts and depressions and never stopped betting on them. He shaped works like The Great Gatsby and ensured The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms found their audience.

Perkins spent his career insisting that an editor creates nothing and that he only releases the writer's energy. His own career was the proof he was wrong.

This episode is what I learned from A. Scott Berg's Max Perkins: Editor of Genius.

Transcript

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On a rainy night in March of 1946, a 61-year-old man sat at the bar of his favorite Manhattan hotel, finishing the last of several martinis. He was stalling. In an hour, he was due to give a lecture at NYU on the craft of book editing, which was a rare appearance for our martini man, as he never gave lectures and rarely sat for interviews. For more than 30 years, at Charles Scribner's Sons, he had quietly become the most influential editor in America by practicing the art of staying out of the story. When he reached the classroom, the student setup's grade. The teacher introduced him as the man who had done more for American literature in the last 25 years than any other person in publishing. The guest hooked his thumbs into the armholes of his waistcoat and began his lecture. The first thing you must remember, an editor does not add to a book. At best, he serves as a handmaiden to the author. Don't ever get to feeling important about yourself. An editor at most releases energy. He creates nothing. A writer's best work comes entirely from himself. Now, maybe this was his warning to the next generation of publishers to stay humble and not take themselves as seriously as the authors they serve, but it did them no favors in telling them that editors create nothing because his own career ran counter to this description. While Max Perkins never sat down to write a novel cover to cover, he was the quiet architect who created the careers of two of the most famous American writers of the 20th century, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway. Both authors were championed by Perkins, defended against their own publishing house by Perkins, and became icons that are still read today because of Max Perkins. The book, Max Perkins, Editor of Genius by A. Scott Berg, serves as today's jumping off point. And if you want to learn more, I link the book in the show notes. This is episode six of Confidance. I don't believe much in tinkering, and I am not sufficient enough to think the publisher can contribute much by counseling modifications. That was the stated editorial policy of Scribner's editor-in-chief, William Brownell, and Perkins' first editorial boss. When Perkins joined Scribner's in 1910, book editing was not this full service creative job of developing authors and their work. Editors were risk-inverse when it came to new authors and existed mainly to gatekeep Scribner's prestigious literary taste and chase down typos on manuscripts. Scribner's at the time was one of the most respected houses in America, but even by 1900 standards, they were seen as old and stuffy. Their catalog read like a who's who of uppercrust literature, publishing the works of Henry James, Edith Warden, and John Galsworthy. Even their owner, Charles Scribner Sr., old CS by his nickname, had run the company since the 1870s and did not particularly care for the new generation of authors or what they had to say. Despite the stuffy culture, though, Max Perkins easily blended in at Scribner's. He was just as blue-blooded as anyone in the company, tracing his family back to 1600s New England on both sides and was Harvard class of 1907. He shared Scribner's respect for decency and tradition and was reserved even by New England standards. However, he had an appetite for risk and strong opinions about literature and was looking for an excuse to share them. His moment would come in 1918 when a manuscript arrived at Scribner's by way of an existing author, Shane Leslie. The novel was called The Romantic Egotist and was penned by a 22-year-old Princeton dropout and Army Lieutenant named F. Scott Fitzgerald. When it crossed the old guard's desk, they hated it. Brownell couldn't stomach the work, and editors in his camp found it hard sledding to read. When it reached the new guard of editors, Perkins read it and was the only one who liked it. He knew, though, that Scribner's would never publish it because paper was rationed after World War I and they weren't going to waste it on this new Fitzgerald guy. For some reason, though, call it fandom or pity. Instead of reaching for the typical Scribner's boilerplate rejection letter, Perkins took the time to give editorial notes on the work. In his letter, he shared that the character and plot needed to end up somewhere to justify the reader's time and that the pacing of the novel was really slow. He committed a further heresy by ending the note saying, We hope we shall see it again and we shall then reread it immediately. This went against all protocol at Scribner's. Editors did not give writers feedback in rejection letters or encourage them like this. The old guard would have seen this as an overreach and not their job to coach writers and push them along. Perkins, though, as part of the younger generation, ignored convention and sided with talent. Fitzgerald rewrote the book and resubmitted to Scribner's again. They rejected it. Perkins was determined to get Fitzgerald published and even shopped the book around to rival publishing houses behind Scribner's back. They rejected him too. Nobody quite saw yet what Perkins saw in Fitzgerald, and he thought he might be able to talk Scribner's into signing Fitzgerald if they changed the title of the book and the narrative perspective from first to third person. It would give them something new to talk about. Armed with a new title and manuscript, this time titled This Side of Paradise, Perkins entered the editorial meeting to pitch Fitzgerald again. When This Side of Paradise was discussed, Charles Scribner Sr. opened their editorial meeting stating that the House would only publish books of literary value and wouldn't just publish anything to be seen as this hip new place to be. Brown, of course, agreed, and the vote was about to go against The Side of Paradise until Old CS noticed that the youngest editor in the room had not said a word to defend the book. He asked Perkins what he thought, and Perkins stood up and started pacing, and he told the room that my feeling is that a publisher's first allegiance is to talent. And if we aren't going to publish talent like this, it is a very serious thing. He contended that the ambitious Fitzgerald would be able to find another suitable publisher to publish his novels and other authors would follow him as well. This basically would mean they would miss out on a generation of authors for not getting with the times. And as Perkins put it, they might as well just go out of business. He then put it all on the table and said, if we're going to turn down the likes of Fitzgerald, I will lose all interest in publishing books. So he put his money where his mouth was and was ready to walk away from Scribner's if they didn't publish his pet project and an author he really believed in. The board voted and landed on a tie between the old guard and new guard, leaving Old CS to cast the deciding vote. After some deliberation, Fitzgerald was now a Scribner's author. This Side of Paradise came out in March of 1920 and sold out in three days. Fitzgerald at 23 became the youngest novelist Scribner's had ever published and had his first blockbuster novel. Max Perkins at 35 had changed the scope of what being a book editor was at Scribner's and started transforming the publishing house into the it place to be for 1920s and 1930s writers. This side of paradise made Fitzgerald a star. But anytime fame and stardom pop up really quickly, especially in a young 20-something year old, uh, money problems aren't far behind, and Fitzgerald was no different. He had very expensive taste and he would quickly blow through the advances that Scribner's gave him and the money he made from books. Perkins himself, throughout his whole career, would have to personally loan him money and find creative ways to keep Fitzgerald afloat and productive during his career. His second novel, The Beautiful and Damned, came out in 1922 and sold reasonably well. It wasn't a this side of paradise size blockbuster, but it sold well enough to make Fitzgerald think that he could get away with writing a play for his next project. And in 1923, he wrote a satire called The Vegetable. He opened the play in Atlantic City and tried as a tryout before Broadway as a way to gauge the audience's reaction. He would have to pay for it with his own money, and he still owed Scribner's and Max money. So there was a lot financially relying on relying on Fitzgerald. When the curtain opened, it didn't take very long for the audience to uh give their feedback and they would walk out, they walked out of his play uh very quickly, and the play never made it to New York. Fitzgerald was broke, burned through a lot of the goodwill he had at Scribner's, and personally owed his champion and the only one who really fought for him at Scribner's a lot of money. So he rented a cheap villa on the French Riviera in 1924 and told Perkins he was going to Europe to write another novel. And Perkins, to his credit, uh was never bitter. He always saw the best in Fitzgerald. That's the big theme with their relationship, is that he always saw Fitzgerald as the person who wrote This Side of Paradise and was always one away from doing that sort of work again. So he wrote basically back, I'll be here when you need me. A different editor would have tightened up the terms of their agreement, or a different editor wouldn't have even loaned him money. Uh, but uh they would have tightened up the contract and applied the pressure to get their client under control. Perkins did the opposite, and he always sided with talent and cleared the runway for Scott and let him know that he could disappear to France and write whatever novel he wanted to write. What's great about studying Perkins is that you get to see how these book titles that you're familiar with evolved and where they came from. Scott's next book started off with the title Among the Ash Heaps and Millionaires, which Perkins hated. And then there was The Trimacchio in West Egg, which was a reference to ancient Roman poetry that Scribners hated. And so they went back to the name that Perkins liked all along, and with his help, Fitzgerald was confident that his next book would be a big seller, and that book would become The Great Gadsby. Perkins and Fitzgerald worked on Gatsby through letters mostly between New York and France, and Perkins' main contributions to Gatsby was flushing out the title character. He worried when he read drafts that Gatsby was almost too mysterious and that the reader could lose him and he could be a lot more powerful to the reader. Perkins wrote to Fitzgerald, can he be physically described as distinctly as the others? And can you add one or two characteristics like the use of that phrase, old sport? Not verbal, but physical ones. Perhaps I think that for some reason or other a reader, this was true of Mr. Scribner and of Louise, Louise's wife, uh, gets an idea that Gatsby is much older, an older man than he is. Although you have the writer say that he is a little older than himself. But this would be avoided if on his first appearance he was seen as vividly as Daisy and Tom are, for instance, and I do not think your scheme would be impaired if you made him so. Through some of these edits, Perkins helped co-create an enduring icon of literature, but he never got too big to think that he was bigger than the writer, and the credit would always go to talent. He wrote Fitzgerald after reading one of his drafts, My God, you have plainly mastered the craft, of course, but you needed far more than craftsmanship for this. Fitzgerald had an equal admiration for him, writing him back saying that he would rather Max like his books than anybody he knew. The Great Gatsby came out in April of 1925, and it did not sell well either, which was a bummer for Fitzgerald and Perkins. Inside Scribner's Perkins' clout had risen to the fact that he had been able to whisper this side of paradise out and was kind of a rainmaker for the firm. And so the sales seaman bet on this book and when it underperformed, Perkins was the one who took the blame instead of putting it all on Fitzgerald. Meanwhile, in France, Fitzgerald was devastated by the numbers and talked about chasing easier money as a screenwriter in Hollywood, which was always the siren song for novelists who go to Hollywood and write screenplays for a steady paycheck. It's instead of working on their novels. Perkins spent the rest of that time after Gatsby trying to talk him out of going to Hollywood and said he should keep working on a novel. But something else came out of those letters between Perkins and Fitzgerald in 1925. Fitzgerald had been spending time in Paris with other expat writers, including a young American who he was telling everybody about, and that writer's name was his friend Ernest Hemingway. And by fall of 1925, Scott was writing to Perkins saying that he needed to sign Hemingway to Scribner's, and the upcoming chase between Hemingway and Perkins would change all three of their lives. Ernest Hemingway was 26 in the fall of 1925. He was a former Kansas City reporter who served in World War I as an ambulance driver and had joined other expat writers in Paris. He became fast friends with Fitzgerald and the other members of the art scene in Paris that met at Gertrude Stein's salon during the time. Fitzgerald sent Max samples of Hemingway's novel In Our Time, and Perkins was blown away by the style. The signature short declarative style of Hemingway was already there in his first book, and Max knew he wanted to sign him to Scribner's. The problem was Hemingway was already signed to another publishing house and rejected Perkins. His opinionated and macho personality was there from the beginning, and in his rejection letter to Perkins, he said that he found the novel to be an awfully artificial and worked-out form, and that he hoped to someday write an exhaustive study of Spanish bullfighting. And he prided himself on his originality and great ideas, not before signing off his note by saying he was a bad prospect for a publisher, anyways. Fitzgerald, though, was Perkins' mole in Europe and kept seeing Hemingway socially. Hemingway loved the great Gatsby, and as time went on, revealed that he was unhappy with his publishing house. He decided he wanted to go with Scribner's, but needed to find a way to get out of his contract. This part of Hemingway's career, even early on, reveals a key difference between him and Fitzgerald, and that was Hemingway was strategic and ruthless about his career. To get out of his existing contract, he quickly wrote a parody book, poking fun, at his publishing house's best-selling and biggest author. And he knew that there would be a good chance that they never published this book. And in rejecting the book, it would break the contract and make him a free agent. When he became a free agent, Hemingway was a known entity in the world of publishing, and a bidding war amongst the various houses ensued. It was an all-hands-on-deck at Scribbiners to sign Hemingway. Perkins had a reputation for talent and an existing relationship with Hemingway that gave him confidence that he had an edge in this bidding war. However, there was a letter to Fitzgerald that revealed some doubt. And despite the big plans he had for Hemingway and the culture he was building at Scribbiners, there was a chance he might not get in. And he said Harkourt, which was another publisher, was an admirable publisher, but he insisted that Hemingway would be better off in Scribner's hands because we are absolutely true to our authors and support them loyally in the face of losses for a long time when we believe in their qualities and in them. Is that kind of publisher that Hemingway probably needs because I hardly think he could come into a large public immediately. He ought to be published by ones who believe in him and is prepared to lose money for a period in enlarging his market. Although he would certainly, even without much support, get recognition through his own powers. Perkins' uh strategy for Scribner's was to sign artists early and co-create and build their audience together. And he knew that formula of talent and devotion to his artists would create a dynasty at Scribner's. But the foundation of that was always talent. And he knew that Hemingway had it and he needed to be a Scribner's artist. The chase ended in uh 1926, and Max signed Hemingway to Scribner's, with the terms hinging on one major deal point. Scribner's had to publish not just the parody novel that his other publisher had rejected, but also his debut novel, Sight Unseen. This was a huge risk for Scribner's, but one that Max was happy to burden if it meant signing Hemingway. And the parody novel was no problem to publish, but his debut novel, The Sun Also Rises, would test Perkins' devotion to his authors and his standing in the company. The book was about a group of American and British expats drinking their way through Paris and Spain. Hemingway's characters were real and talked the way American and British men actually talked after years of trench warfare. They were crude, held no punches, and they swore. Not a lot, but enough. And enough was to get the attention of Old CS who was prepared to heavily censor the book or even spike the project. One editor said, Charles Scribner would no sooner allow profanity in one of his books than he would invite friends to use his parlor as a toilet room. However, Old CS had built Scribner's as a place of debate, and the fight for The Sun also Rises went down in the same editorial meetings where the fight over this side of paradise had gone down years earlier. With Fitzgerald, Perkins pled literary value. With Hemingway, he pled staying true to an artist's integrity and an author's voice. Plus, he added that the younger generation of authors already thought of Scribners as his stuffy house, and rumors of censorship would only confirm that attitude and cost him opportunities of signing talent. He closed his speech, adding he'd quit as editor over the censorship of Hemingway. It was the same pitch he gave for Fitzgerald, and it worked again for Hemingway. He was now two for two in editorial meetings, and they published Hemingway's book with most of language intact. He pushed Hemingway to soften certain scenes that framed every edit as a question of getting closer to the truth and essence of what Hemingway wanted to say. With Fitzgerald, you had to appeal to his ambition, but with Hemingway, you had to appeal to truth and his craft, and Perkins figured that out very fast when editing both writers. The Sun Also Rises came out in October of 1926, and it was a blockbuster for Hemingway. Not only was it commercially successful, but it made the literary establishment take him seriously, and more importantly, made the establishment take the whole group of young expat writers more seriously. The Lost Generation had something to say, and they now had a name, a sound, and a champion in Max Perkins and Scriveners. Inside the company, Perkins was now seen as the brains of the operation and the Lost Generation whisperer. His voice carried larger and larger weight within the company and the old guard, now readily deferred to his judgment when it came to authors and their work. He was now editing two of the most distinctive writers in American literature at the same time, Fitzgerald the Romantic and Hemingway the Minimalist. They were two distinct voices, but shared one champion, an editor. The thing Perkins started doing with Hemingway that he never did with Fitzgerald was traveling. Hemingway at this time was done with Europe and set up shop down in Key West, Florida. Rather than correspond only by mail, he wanted Perkins to make trips down to see him and experience his world. His trips to Key West allowed him to see Hemingway in his element and hear about the progress on his next novel, Farewell to Arms. For his second novel, Hemingway really stretched himself. This time, his novel was a semi-autobiographical book about a romance between an American Anglican driver, sound familiar, and a nurse during the Italian campaign of World War I. The book, though, was just as raunchy and controversial as The Sun Also Rises, and Max had to carefully run cover at Scribner's for Hemingway and plan how to build his public for the book. What he really wanted to do was widen the market for the type of person who'd read Hemingway. And even in a letter to uh Hemingway, he likened him to a painter whose style wasn't quite yet understood by the public and needed some getting used to. Perkins' solution Perkins' solution to this problem was to serialize the book in Scribner's magazine before publishing it as a complete work. That way, when the book was ready to be published, it would be more widely accepted and have a built-in audience for the novel. After its serial run, the book came out in September of 1929 and was a smash hit. It was another win for Hemingway, Perkins, and Scribner's, and made the author finally financially independent for the first time. He would use that money to set up a trust fund for his family, and the rest went towards a fishing boat down in Key West. By the end of the 1920s, Perkins was on top. He managed two of the top writers of the decade who knew each other and kept tabs on what each other was doing through Perkins. Hemingway's career was a rocket ship, having published two hits in three years. Fitzgerald, on the other hand, was stalling out and hadn't published a novel since Gatsby in 1925, despite on again and off again efforts. Both a star on the rise and a has been on the edge required Perkins to coach each writer in a different way, and here's how he managed each one. For Fitzgerald, he was the dependable and supportive uncle. It was a full contact relationship, and he managed everything for Fitzgerald, both on and off the page. He supported him financially with personal loans that he rarely expected to get paid back or made arrangements at Scribner's to loan him money. He kept him productive and wrote him letters of encouragement when Fitzgerald was feeling down on himself and his career. And despite his alcoholism and creative drought, Fitzgerald would forever be that star that he discovered back in his early days as a junior editor at Scribner's. For Hemingway, Perkins was the older brother to the Daredevil younger brother. He wasn't the bank or therapist, he was Fitzgerald and served more as his number one fan and the reminder of when Hemingway needed to slow down and be careful. In a lot of ways, Hemingway was a forbidden alter ego for Perkins, and he wrote his daughter saying, Hemingway loves to write for those of us who will never come face to face with danger. There was a certain wildness and freedom in Hemingway's writing that the uptight and highbrow Perkins couldn't indulge in in the real world. So he lived vicariously through Hemingway's work. And Berg put it best when he said he identified with Hemingway's machismo, but could never live it. That invitation to adventure was the secret sauce to Hemingway's. Work and what Perkins tapped into as a fan and editor when working with Hemingway, and it's a main driver of why Hemingway is still read a hundred years later. However, where the relationship between his troubled nephew and Daredevil younger brother turned sour going into the 1930s, and Perkins would have to manage the rivalry between his two famous authors and him step in and play peacekeeper for the rest of his career. It would be far too simplistic to say that the feuds stem from Fitzgerald's alcoholism, though he was a bad drunk who annoyed Hemingway. You know you have a drinking problem when you're bugging Ernest Hemingway. But the more he became friends with Fitzgerald, the more Fitzgerald fell off the pedestal Hemingway put him on. In his place, Hemingway put none other than himself on that pedestal. He was no longer the junior partner in the art scene who needed Fitzgerald's mentorship and was now a published author in his own right, and wanted to be thought of as one of the all-time greats, and anything less than hitting that bar would be considered a failure. The fact that Fitzgerald didn't outwardly share that bar came off as lazy to Hemingway, which further led to their riff. Plus the fact that Fitzgerald made most of his money writing short stories for the Saturday Evening Post instead of writing novels irked Hemingway even more. Fitzgerald always claimed that the short stories were a bridge job for him to save up the money necessary for him to spend the time he needed to write his novels. This explanation, though, to Hemingway never quite seemed believable, and he took it as more being lazy or Fitzgerald being self-conscious about new work. What really set Hemingway off was when Fitzgerald told him that when he wrote his post stories, he wrote them the way he wanted to start them off. But when he went to the post to pitch them, he'd changed them slightly in ways that made them more marketable, which was disgusting to Hemingway and his sense of artistic integrity and truth. After hearing this explanation, he went so far as to distance himself from Fitzgerald as to not have his practices rub off on him and sully his pristine ideals. He'd write to Perkins calling Fitzgerald's post stories slop and that he was wasting his time cheating with these stories and should either write his next novel or move on to another project. Perkins privately agreed with Hemingley, but still funded Fitzgerald's lifestyle and encouraged him in hopes that a novel would come out at the end. We've been beating up on Fitzgerald, so I need to defend him a little bit. His marriage during this time played a big role in why he needed to publish these short stories. His marriage to Zelda could be a hit spell and show, but the major part was that in the 30s. She was institutionalized both in Europe and America, and he would use the proceeds from these post stories to pay for her medical care, which wasn't cheap. Perkins, too, would chip in to pay for Zelda's medical expenses and help Fitzgerald secure more money to make sure his wife was getting the care she needed, and even correspond with Zelda through personal letters to keep her spirits up. Despite everything going on in Fitzgerald's personal life, though, after nine years, he came out with his fourth novel in 1934, Tender is the Night. It sold reasonably well for the first few weeks, but ended up petering out. It was well received by critics, though he did have one harsh critic, and I bet you can guess who it was. Hemingway wrote to Perkins after reading Tender is the Night, and he thought that there were splendid cascades of prose, but there seemed to be something wrong beneath the surface behind the worn Christmas ornaments that are Scott's idea of literature. Perkins kept his policy of neutrality when it came to his feuding clients, and he agreed with some of the additional criticism that Hemingway levied at Fitzgerald, but reaffirmed that Scott's romanticism gave him his voice and was the main draw for his readers and audience. Hemingway continued to produce new work and grow his readership. His books on bullfighting and safari ventures continued his popularity. But as they build you up, they're always looking for an excuse to bring you down. And around this time, old friends were coming out with books, Stibe and Hemingway. None hurt more than his early mentor and high priestess of the art scene in Paris, Gertrude Stei, who came out with her own book where she regretted giving birth to the Hemingway. This characterization infuriated Hemingway, and he was only calmed down when Perkins gave him the sage advice of it showed the high priestess to be a petty character, and a petty character cannot amount to much. Despite taking his own criticism, his criticism of Fitzgerald didn't stop, and he continued to snipe about him to Perkins, going so far as calling him the great tragedy of talent in our bloody generation. What else is at play during this feud and all his letters to Perkins is the hidden dynamic of any criticism laid at Fitzgerald is in a way laid at Perkins as well. Perkins is still Fitzgerald's editor and kind of life coach, for lack of a better word. And all the sniping was personal to Perkins just as much as it was personal to Fitzgerald. But during this time, he showed his ability to keep a strong diplomatic stance when it came to this feud between his two clients, and he never grew angry at Hemingway despite the gratuitous and sometimes unnecessary criticism. He took a stance of accepting criticism that was true and defending Fitzgerald whenever possible and when he thought that Hemingway overreached, there would be a major overreach in 1936, and Perkins himself would break his neutrality and intervene directly into the feud. It all stemmed from Fitzgerald's article in Esquire called Crack Up. During this time, Fitzgerald was in a deep depression, and he thought he'd write his way out of it by publishing a confessional article for the magazine. Of course, Hemingway hated it and thought it was pathetic. His belief was Fitzgerald should come out of his depression fighting and not whining to the public. He resented that Fitzgerald was at this time taking pride in his shamelessness of defeat. His contempt towards Fitzgerald seeped into his next story, which was also for Esquire, called The Snow of Kilbanjaro. It told the story of a dying author in Africa, hallucinating about his memories of the Jazz Age. In the story, he directly name check poor Scott Fitzgerald for famously being wrecked by his romance of the rich and their glamour. Fitzgerald was furious. He wrote a wounded letter to Hemingway to remove his name in feature reprints and to not take swipes at him in public ever again, to which Hemingway just wrote him back a long diatribe about how great of a writer he was and what his thoughts on great literature were. Perkins thought that Hemingway was way out of line for his comment and told him Fitzgerald's name would be removed in future republishings for Scribner's. Hemingway agreed to reduce the name to just Scott, but Perkins held firm and stood by Fitzgerald in demanding a full name change to someone else. They settled on an anonymous Julian. Because of Max Perkins, Scott's name was safe for now. His career though was not, and his bank account was almost gone. In July of 1937, Fitzgerald boarded a train for Los Angeles to give Hollywood another go. He was in rough shape financially and needed the steady paycheck of screenwriting from a studio. Perkins was happy that he landed a job with MGM, but he knew that he wouldn't be seeing a novel from Fitzgerald anytime soon. Fitzgerald had been to Hollywood before, but this time was different, and he found inspiration for a new novel based on his day job in Hollywood. It would be about the growing film industry and the moguls inside the machines that made it work. And it was called The Last Tycoon. This was the most excited Perkins had seen Fitzgerald in a long time. While Fitzgerald was fighting for his future, Perkins was busy fighting for his legacy back in New York. This side of paradise in the late 30s had gone out of print, and Scribner's was not going to publish any more copies, leaving the last bit of inventory to sell out. Perkins tried inside the company to use his clout to keep the book from just becoming a relic of the jazz age, but they wouldn't republish the side of paradise. Fitzgerald owed them too much money and was too flaky to take a risk on, and they decided that they would just sell out. Perkins did what he did for Fitzgerald 20 years earlier and went so far as to shop the rights for the book to other publishing houses, such as discount publishers, to keep The Side of Paradise alive, but no publisher would take him up on his offer and he saw Fitzgerald as a relic from another age. To keep his spirits high out in Hollywood, Perkins had him focus on the last tycoon and his comeback. However, Fitzgerald will never fully come back and he'd have a sudden heart attack in 1940 and die at the age of 44. Shortly before his death, Fitzgerald had a fight with his manager, and he changed his will, making Perkins the executor of his estate. Perkins knew nothing about estate planning, so he left the financial part to a bank and a judge to settle his affairs, but he took on the job of being his literary executor and would shape Fitzgerald's body of work and legacy. Similar to Roy Disney and finishing Disney World for Walt in episode three, he wanted to finish the swing and publish the last tycoon for Fitzgerald. A different executor and a different house might have left the unfinished manuscript in a drawer and moved on with his other clients. Perkins didn't do that. He brought in Edmund Wilson, Scott's Princeton classmate and one of the country's leading critics, to assemble the fragments and notes into a finished work. Perkins handled the planning inside Scrimers and decided to package the Last Tycoon into a single volume alongside the full text of the Great Gatsby and other short stories written by Fitzgerald. That packaging was an important editorial choice because it not only introduced the role to The Last Tycoon, but it put Gatsby back into the Zeitgeist for the first time in years. The Last Tycoon came out in October of 1941. The sales were modest, but it put Fitzgerald back into the conversation. For the rest of his life, Perkins would keep fighting for Fitzgerald's legacy whenever he could. He lobbied Princeton to celebrate one of their distinguished authors and alumni. He answered academic inquiries, and he pushed other authors to consider writing a Fitzgerald biography. Before 1940, Fitzgerald looked like a jazz H footnote with a thin shelf of books that would slowly fall out of print. The only reason he became the author that we remember today was because of Perkins' efforts and his refusal to let Fitzgerald's work die. Remember what Perkins said to his class. An editor at most releases energy, he creates nothing. The Last Tycoon was the last book of F. Scott Fitzgerald's career, but it was also the first book of his posthumous one. Perkins had quietly now created F. Scott Fitzgerald twice. Once in 1920 when he convinced Old CS to publish the twice rejected first novel, and now again in 1941, when he refused to let the unfinished manuscript become the end of F. Scott Fitzgerald's story. Before his death, Hemingway had reconciled with Fitzgerald and took a more cheerful tone with him in his letters. But writing was writing for Hemingway, and he couldn't help himself when the last tycoon came out. He wrote Perkins and he likened the book to a slab of bacon that had grown mold on top of it. Perkins tried to change the subject and focus on the positives. He told Hemingway that the book was well reviewed and he never thought that Fitzstril got the credit he deserved for his last book, Tender is the Night. Behind that letter, Hemingway was jealous of Perkins' attention to Fitzstril's second act from Beyond the Grave and wasn't entirely feeling the love from his editor. Hemingway started the 40s by publishing For Whom the Bell Tolls, but spent most of the decade in a slump. He case U-boats in the Caribbean during World War II and went abroad as a correspondent. He lived in Cuba, drank more, started and abandoned several novels, and fought with his third wife and married a fourth. Perkins, though, to his credit, answered every letter and stood by his friend and client the way he stood by Fitzgerald when Fitzgerald was at his lowest. However, Perkins' age in the 1940s was starting to show through, and he turned 60 in 1944. He was no stranger to the hard life of drinking and smoking alongside his bonvival authors and was trying to balance the pace of his job, his age, and his health. World War II had captured the literary imagination of America and a new crop of writers with different tastes had filled the market. Despite being frustrated by the materialism of publishing in the 40s and the shutting out of serious book people, he still tried to sign new clients all the way up to the end of his life. In 1946, he was honored at the Scribner's Centennial as the editorial giant who had renewed the firm decades earlier. A year later in 1947, Max Perkins died in his Connecticut home. Charles Scribner Jr. broke the news to Hemingway, who had lost a lot of friends, including Fitzgerald and now Perkins, in the surrounding years, and he wrote back to Scribner saying, our Heavenly Father was perhaps dealing off the bottom of the deck. His brief and gallows humor-filled letter wouldn't be Hemingway's final word on his lifelong friend and editor. He'd finally get around to writing his fishing story placed in Key West, which was something Perkins had always suggested that he do, and The Old Man in the Sea came out in 1952. It won the Pulitzer Prize the following year and helped clinch the Nobel Prize in Literature for Hemingway. On the inside cover, he dedicated the book to Charles Scribner and his lifelong editor, mentor, and friend Maxwell Perkins. Before I sign off, I want to go over the three takeaways from today's episode. The first one is creating is easy, releasing energy takes real work. At the beginning of the show, Perkins told his students that an editor at most releases energy. His career showed that releasing energy was a relentless process and took real work both on and off the page. On the page, it meant reading draft after draft and making structural changes to stories and characters like he did with Gatsby and his tagline of Old Sport. Off the page, it meant putting your career on the line for your authors, bankrolling Fitzgerald across his whole career, and keeping up with Hemingway no matter where in the world he was or what mood he was in. No business card says releasing energy on it. It's a sort of work nobody sees and everybody needs, and it's easy to underestimate from the outside, but impossible to fake from the inside. The second takeaway is the best way to lead an artist is to follow them. Perkins never used one leadership style. He was the patient uncle to Fitzgerald, loaning him money and picking him up every time he fell, and the respected older brother to Hemingway, pushing back and slowing him down in the only language Hemingway respected the truth. He knew he could only control these men so far. They were going to write what they wanted to write, live how they wanted to live, and feud when they wanted to feud. So instead of steering them, he learned each man's temperament and met them where they were. Most people lead the way that's comfortable for them and expect everyone else to adapt. The best confidants do the opposite, and that's why Perkins could be two completely different things to Fitzgerald and Hemingway without ever losing his conviction or loyalty towards them. And the third and final takeaway is defend the talent from the house that signed it. The biggest threat to Fitzgerald and Heningway didn't come from critics or the public. They came from inside Scribner's, the same house that was supposed to be on their side. Scribner's wanted to reject Fitzgerald's manuscript and later wanted to censor Hemingway's language and not publish The Sun Also Rises. Both times, Perkins stood up in editorial meetings and put his own career on the line. He told the room that if Scribner's wouldn't publish talent like this, he'd lose all interest in publishing. He made his career defending talent and betting the house was wrong and he was right. Most people learn to defend their work against outside forces. Fewer learn that bigger threats are often internal, coming from the very people that are supposed to have your back. Protecting a vision from enemies within is its own discipline, and it's one that separates a confidant who serves the work from one who just serves the boss. I want to thank you all for tuning into today's episode. I should be back in a few weeks with our next episode, which will be on another Steve Jobs confidant, and that's CEO of Apple, Tim Cook. Hope to see you next time, and thanks again for listening.