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.
At a time when recognition and kudos went increasingly to editors who dealt with high-profile agents to win expensive auctions for sure-fire bestsellers, Gottlieb was heir to the legacy of Maxwell Perkins, who had guided the careers of Ernest Hemingway, Scott Fitzgerald and others in the first half of the century. But Gottlieb’s reach extended even further, in both fiction and non-fiction, as well as a five-year spell as editor of the New Yorker, and his own writing, which included eight works of non-fiction.
Gottlieb believed that “the first thing writers want – and this sounds so basic, but you’d be surprised how unbasic it is in the publishing world – is a quick response”. He signed Michael Crichton, then a medical student writing pot-boilers, because Crichton’s agent told him the editor was “an overnight guy”.
He edited John le Carré, whose contract for A Perfect Spy required Gottlieb, in retaliation to what Le Carré called “his stingy advances”, to take him out for a business lunch. “In no case have I ever regretted taking Bob’s advice. In all the large things, he’s always been right,” Le Carré said. “A Perfect Spy is the novel of mine that is closest to my heart. It is also my most autobiographical. Bob pointed out the places where he felt … that I had really spilled into private experience. He was terribly good at that.”
Besides Caro, Gottlieb’s non-fiction writers included Antonia Fraser, Bruno Bettelheim, Barbara Tuchman, and BF Skinner. He was obsessed with dance, publishing biographies of Margot Fonteyn and Mikhail Baryshnikov, and a keen film buff, who edited biographies of Lauren Bacall, Katharine Hepburn, Liv Ullman and Sidney Poitier. The film scholar Jeanine Basinger, who was edited by him for 35 years, said “no one had ever made me laugh harder and no one has ever taught me more. He got you to write the book you wanted to write.”
His 2019 memoir was titled An Avid Reader. Born Robert Adams Gottlieb (the middle name from his uncle by marriage, Arthur Adams, who turned out to be a Russian atomic spy) in Manhattan, he was the son of Martha (nee Keen), a teacher, and Charles Gottlieb, a lawyer. A delicate child, he retreated into books, helped by his parents often both reading at the dinner table, and by education at the liberal Ethical Culture Fieldston school in the city.
He often read three or four books after school, and finished War and Peace in one epic 16-hour sitting. At Columbia University, where he majored in English, he met his first wife, Muriel Higgins; after graduating in 1952 he spent two years studying at Cambridge.
In 1955 he joined Simon & Schuster as an assistant to the editor-in-chief, Jack Goodman. Goodman died at the same time the publishing house was sold back to two of its founders; many editors quit and Gottlieb overnight became a senior editor. In 1965 he was made editor-in-chief, but after three years he moved to Alfred Knopf, part of Random House, in the same position, becoming president of the company in 1973.
In 1987, by which time Random House was owned by the Newhouse family, SI Newhouse offered Gottlieb the editorship of the New Yorker, which he also owned. He was replacing William Shawn, who had been the magazine’s second editor, after its founder Harold Ross. Although staff revolted against the change, Gottlieb took the job and won them over; managing to modernise the content while keeping the magazine’s core style intact. His successes included Cheever’s diaries and Janet Malcolm’s major study The Journalist and the Murderer, among other long features that followed the magazine’s tradition of becoming successful books.
But Gottlieb’s was a holding role; Newhouse brought in Tina Brown as editor in 1992, and Gottlieb returned to Knopf, now headed by Sonny Mehta, as editor ex officio, working gratis thanks to Newhouse’s generous severance. He also became the dance critic of the New York Observer, and wrote frequently in the New York Review of Books and elsewhere; a collection of his essays, Near-Death Experiences … and Others, appeared in 2018.
His first book, A Certain Style (1988), had been about another of his obsessions, collecting plastic handbags; in 2004 he wrote a biography of the dancer/choreographer George Balanchine. He followed with a study of Charles Dickens’s children, Great Expectations: The Sons and Daughters of Charles Dickens (2012), and in recent years biographies of Sarah Bernhardt (2019) and Greta Garbo (2021).
Gottlieb’s long partnership with Caro was detailed in a documentary, Turn Every Page (2022) made by his daughter, Lizzie. After The Power Broker, Gottlieb had encouraged Caro to leave a proposed biography of the New York mayor Fiorello La Guardia and instead begin one of Lyndon Johnson. This monumental project stretched over four volumes, with the fifth and final instalment due later this year.
Twelve years ago, when Gottlieb turned 80, and Caro 75, he mused that he might not be around to see the project completed. He wasn’t worried. “The truth,” he said, “is Bob Caro doesn’t really need me … but he thinks he does.” Many authors would have thought the same.
Gottlieb’s marriage to Muriel ended in divorce. He is survived by his second wife, the actor Maria Tucci, whom he married in 1969, and whose father, Niccolò Tucci, was an author Gottlieb edited; by their children, Lizzie and Nicholas; and by his son, Roger, from his first marriage.
• Robert Adams Gottlieb, editor and writer, born 29 April 1931; died 14 June 2023
