The literary editor Robert Gottlieb, who worked with some of the most important figures of American letters at the end of the 20th century, died Wednesday at the age of 92 in a New York hospital, his wife reported to The New York Times.
Gottlieb worked for three decades at Simon Publishing Houses.
He was also an editor for five years at the New Yorker magazine, which today dedicated a long obituary to him in which he recalled how the successful edition of the novel “Catch-22” (1961) by Joseph Heller catapulted his career, which became a bestseller.
Gottlieb was born in 1931 in New York and was the only child of a couple of avid readers, from whom he learned to love literature and make it a refuge, to the point where he read “three or four books a day after school.” school, and up to 16 hours straight,” he told the Times in the 1980s.
After studying Literature at Columbia University and obtaining a postgraduate degree from Cambridge University, Gottlieb joined the Simon Publishing House.
In 1968, he came to the Knopf house as editor-in-chief and vice-president, also ascending until he was appointed president in 1973, and edited another key novel: “The power broker” (1974), Robert Caro’s biography of Robert Moses, which would end up winning a Pulitzer.
Caro mourned the editor’s death today in a statement to The Times in which she said she had “never found” an editor with “a greater understanding of what a writer was trying to do, and how to help him do it.”
Between 1987 and 1992, Gottlieb was editor of the New Yorker magazine until he was replaced by Tina Brown, and later returned as editor to Knopf.
He always preferred editing to writing and he stated this in various interviews, but his legacy includes, in addition to his accurate editions, some memoirs, “Avid reader: a life” (2016) and other manuscripts, from biographies to reviews collected in books.
On a personal level, he was married twice: in 1952, with Muriel Higgins, with whom he had his son Roger, and after his divorce, in his second marriage, in 1969, with the actress Maria Tucci, with whom he had two children, Lizzie and Nicky.
