Robert Gottlieb, who has died age 92, was the outstanding literary editor of the second half of the 20th century. Among the renowned novelists he worked with were Doris Lessing, Toni Morrison, Salman Rushdie, Anthony Burgess, VS Naipaul and John Cheever, as well as popular successes such as Ray Bradbury, Charles Portis, John Lennon and Bob Dylan.
It was Gottlieb who suggested Joseph Heller change the title of Catch-18 to Catch-22, which he thought was funnier, and which he knew would not conflict with Leon Uris’ upcoming novel Mila 18 on booksellers’ shelves. And it was Gottlieb who famously worked with Robert Caro to cut 350,000 words from his million-word study of the New York City administrator Robert Moses. The Power Broker, a classic analysis of urban planning and the backrooms of American politics, went on to be an unlikely bestseller.
