Robert Adams Gottlieb is an American

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

 writer and editor. From 1987 to 1992 he was the editor of The New Yorker

The New Yorker

The New Yorker is an American magazine of reportage, commentary, criticism, essays, fiction, satire, cartoons and poetry published by Condé Nast...

.

Personal

Robert Gottlieb was born in New York City in 1931 and grew up in Manhattan. He graduated from Columbia University

Columbia University

Columbia University in the City of New York is a private, Ivy League university in Manhattan, New York City. Columbia is the oldest institution of higher learning in the state of New York, the fifth oldest in the United States, and one of the country's nine Colonial Colleges founded before the...

 in 1952, and spent two years at Cambridge University before joining Simon and Schuster in 1955 as an editorial assistant to Jack Goodman, the editor-in-chief.

He is married to Maria Tucci, an actress whose father, the novelist Niccolò Tucci

Niccolò Tucci

Niccolò Tucci was a short story writer and novelist who wrote in English and Italian.Born in Lugano, Switzerland of a Russian mother and an Italian father who became a Swiss citizen, Niccolò Tucci grew up in privileged circumstances that were eliminated by the Bolshevik Revolution. His family...

, was one of Gottlieb's writers. They have two children: Lizzie Gottlieb, a film director, and Niccolò (Nicky). Nicky has Asperger syndrome

Asperger syndrome

Asperger's syndrome that is characterized by significant difficulties in social interaction, alongside restricted and repetitive patterns of behavior and interests. It differs from other autism spectrum disorders by its relative preservation of linguistic and cognitive development...

 and is the subject of one of his sister's documentary films Today's Man.

Career

Gottlieb discovered and edited Catch-22

Catch-22

Catch-22 is a satirical, historical novel by the American author Joseph Heller. He began writing it in 1953, and the novel was first published in 1961. It is set during World War II in 1943 and is frequently cited as one of the great literary works of the twentieth century...

by the then-unknown Joseph Heller

Joseph Heller

Joseph Heller was a US satirical novelist, short story writer, and playwright. His best known work is Catch-22, a novel about US servicemen during World War II...

. He served as editor-in-chief of Simon & Schuster

Simon & Schuster

Simon & Schuster, Inc., a division of CBS Corporation, is a publisher founded in New York City in 1924 by Richard L. Simon and M. Lincoln Schuster. It is one of the four largest English-language publishers, alongside Random House, Penguin and HarperCollins...

 and Alfred A. Knopf

Alfred A. Knopf

Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. is a New York publishing house, founded by Alfred A. Knopf, Sr. in 1915. It was acquired by Random House in 1960 and is now part of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group at Random House. The publishing house is known for its borzoi trademark , which was designed by co-founder...

, which he left in 1987 to succeed William Shawn

William Shawn

William Shawn was an American magazine editor who edited The New Yorker from 1952 until 1987.-Education and Early Life:...

 as editor of The New Yorker

The New Yorker

The New Yorker is an American magazine of reportage, commentary, criticism, essays, fiction, satire, cartoons and poetry published by Condé Nast...

, staying in the position until 1992.

Gottlieb has edited novels by John Cheever

John Cheever

John William Cheever was an American novelist and short story writer. He is sometimes called "the Chekhov of the suburbs." His fiction is mostly set in the Upper East Side of Manhattan, the Westchester suburbs, old New England villages based on various South Shore towns around Quincy,...

, Salman Rushdie, John Gardner, Len Deighton

Len Deighton

Leonard Cyril Deighton is a British military historian, cookery writer, and novelist. He is perhaps most famous for his spy novel The IPCRESS File, which was made into a film starring Michael Caine....

, John le Carre

John le Carré

David John Moore Cornwell , who writes under the name John le Carré, is an author of espionage novels. During the 1950s and the 1960s, Cornwell worked for MI5 and MI6, and began writing novels under the pseudonym "John le Carré"...

, Ray Bradbury

Ray Bradbury

Ray Douglas Bradbury is an American fantasy, horror, science fiction, and mystery writer. Best known for his dystopian novel Fahrenheit 451 and for the science fiction stories gathered together as The Martian Chronicles and The Illustrated Man , Bradbury is one of the most celebrated among 20th...

, Elia Kazan

Elia Kazan

Elia Kazan was an American director and actor, described by the New York Times as "one of the most honored and influential directors in Broadway and Hollywood history". Born in Istanbul, the capital of the Ottoman Empire, to Greek parents originally from Kayseri in Anatolia, the family emigrated...

, Margaret Drabble, Michael Crichton

Michael Crichton

John Michael Crichton , best known as Michael Crichton, was an American best-selling author, producer, director, and screenwriter, best known for his work in the science fiction, medical fiction, and thriller genres. His books have sold over 200 million copies worldwide, and many have been adapted...

, Mordecai Richler

Mordecai Richler

Mordecai Richler, CC was a Canadian Jewish author, screenwriter and essayist. A leading critic called him "the great shining star of his Canadian literary generation" and a pivotal figure in the country's history. His best known works are The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, Barney's Version,...

 and Toni Morrison

Toni Morrison

Toni Morrison is a Nobel Prize and Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist, editor, and professor. Her novels are known for their epic themes, vivid dialogue, and richly detailed characters. Among her best known novels are The Bluest Eye, Song of Solomon and Beloved...

, and non-fiction books by Barbara Tuchman

Barbara Tuchman

Barbara Wertheim Tuchman was an American historian and author. She became known for her best-selling book The Guns of August, a history of the prelude to and first month of World War I, which won the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction in 1963....

, Jessica Mitford

Jessica Mitford

Jessica Lucy Freeman-Mitford was an English author, journalist and political campaigner, who was one of the Mitford sisters...

, Robert Caro

Robert Caro

Robert Allan Caro is an American journalist and author known for his celebrated biographies of United States political figures Robert Moses and Lyndon B. Johnson...

, Antonia Fraser

Antonia Fraser

Lady Antonia Margaret Caroline Fraser, DBE , née Pakenham, is an Anglo-Irish author of history, novels, biographies and detective fiction, best known as Antonia Fraser...

, Lauren Bacall

Lauren Bacall

Lauren Bacall is an American film and stage actress and model, known for her distinctive husky voice and sultry looks.She first emerged as leading lady in the Humphrey Bogart film To Have And Have Not and continued on in the film noir genre, with appearances in The Big Sleep and Dark Passage ,...

, Liv Ullman, Sidney Poitier

Sidney Poitier

Sir Sidney Poitier, KBE is a Bahamian American actor, film director, author, and diplomat.In 1963, Poitier became the first black person to win an Academy Award for Best Actor for his role in Lilies of the Field...

, John Lennon

John Lennon

John Winston Lennon, MBE was an English musician and singer-songwriter who rose to worldwide fame as one of the founding members of The Beatles, one of the most commercially successful and critically acclaimed acts in the history of popular music...

, Paul Simon

Paul Simon

Paul Frederic Simon is an American singer-songwriter and guitarist.Simon is best known for his success, beginning in 1965, as part of the duo Simon & Garfunkel, with musical partner Art Garfunkel. Simon wrote most of the pair's songs, including three that reached number one on the US singles...

, Bob Dylan

Bob Dylan

Bob Dylan is an American singer-songwriter, musician, poet, film director and painter. He has been a major and profoundly influential figure in popular music and culture for five decades. Much of his most celebrated work dates from the 1960s when he was an informal chronicler and a seemingly...

, Bruno Bettelheim

Bruno Bettelheim

Bruno Bettelheim was an Austrian-born American child psychologist and writer. He gained an international reputation for his work on Freud, psychoanalysis, and emotionally disturbed children.-Background:...

 and many others.

Gottlieb rejected John Kennedy Toole

John Kennedy Toole

John Kennedy Toole was an American novelist from New Orleans, Louisiana, best-known for his posthumously published novel A Confederacy of Dunces. He also wrote The Neon Bible. Although several people in the literary world felt his writing skills were praiseworthy, Toole's novels were rejected...

's initial manuscript of A Confederacy of Dunces

A Confederacy of Dunces

A Confederacy of Dunces is a picaresque novel written by John Kennedy Toole, published by LSU Press in 1980, 11 years after the author's suicide. The book was published through the efforts of writer Walker Percy and Toole's mother Thelma Toole, quickly becoming a cult classic, and later a...

. Gottlieb reportedly liked the manuscript, but felt significant changes were required before it could be published. Toole refused the changes and eventually committed suicide in 1969. After Toole's death, his mother, Thelma Toole, in conjunction with author Walker Percy

Walker Percy

Walker Percy was an American Southern author whose interests included philosophy and semiotics. Percy is best known for his philosophical novels set in and around New Orleans, Louisiana, the first of which, The Moviegoer, won the National Book Award for Fiction in 1962...

, had A Confederacy of Dunces published by the Louisiana State Press. John Kennedy Toole posthumously won the Pulitzer Prize for the work.

To date, Gottlieb is the only editor included in the marathon series of writer interviews conducted and published by The Paris Review. The interview with Gottlieb appears in Volume I of the current series of four volumes published by Picador.

Approach to editing

In a 1994 interview with The Paris Review, Gottlieb described his need to "surrender" to a book. "The more you have surrendered," he said, "the more jarring its errors appear. I read a manuscript very quickly, the moment I get it. I usually won't use a pencil the first time through because I'm just reading for impressions. When I read the end, I'll call the writer and say, I think it's very fine (or whatever), but I think there are problems here and here. At that point I don't know why I think that—I just think it. Then I go back and read the manuscript again, more slowly, and I find and mark the places where I had negative reactions to try to figure out what's wrong. The second time through I think about solutions—maybe this needs expanding, maybe there's too much of this so it's blurring that.

Dance

For many years Gottlieb was associated with New York City Ballet

New York City Ballet

New York City Ballet is a ballet company founded in 1948 by choreographer George Balanchine and Lincoln Kirstein. Leon Barzin was the company's first music director. Balanchine and Jerome Robbins are considered the founding choreographers of the company...

, serving as a member of its board of directors. In this vein, he published several books by people from the dance world including Mikhail Baryshnikov

Mikhail Baryshnikov

Mikhail Nikolaevich Baryshnikov is a Soviet and American dancer, choreographer, and actor, often cited alongside Vaslav Nijinsky and Rudolf Nureyev as one of the greatest ballet dancers of the 20th century. After a promising start in the Kirov Ballet in Leningrad, he defected to Canada in 1974...

 and Margot Fonteyn

Margot Fonteyn

Dame Margot Fonteyn de Arias, DBE , was an English ballerina of the 20th century. She is widely regarded as one of the greatest classical ballet dancers of all time...

. He also works as a dance critic for the New York Observer

New York Observer

The New York Observer is a weekly newspaper first published in New York City on September 22, 1987, by Arthur L. Carter, a very successful former investment banker with publishing interests. The Observer focuses on the city's culture, real estate, the media, politics and the entertainment and...

.

External links

• Gottlieb author page and archive from The New York Review of Books
  The New York Review of Books
  The New York Review of Books is a fortnightly magazine with articles on literature, culture and current affairs. Published in New York City, it takes as its point of departure that the discussion of important books is itself an indispensable literary activity...