Bennett Cerf - Biography

Biography

Cerf's father, Gustave Cerf, was a lithographer; his mother, Frederika Wise, was heiress to a tobacco-distribution fortune. She died when Bennett was fifteen; shortly afterward her brother Herbert moved into the Cerf household and became a strong literary and social influence on the teenager.

Cerf attended Townsend Harris High School, the same public school as composer Richard Rodgers, publisher Richard Simon, and playwright Howard Dietz; and he spent his teenage years at 790 Riverside Drive, an apartment building in Washington Heights that was home to two other friends who became prominent as adults, Howard Dietz and the Hearst newspapers financial editor Merryle Rukeyser. He received his Bachelor of Arts from Columbia University (1919) and his Litt.B. (1920) from its School of Journalism. After graduation he briefly worked as a reporter for the New York Herald Tribune and for some time in a Wall Street brokerage. He then was named a vice-president of the publishing firm Boni & Liveright.

In 1925 Cerf and Donald Klopfer formed a partnership to purchase the rights to the Modern Library from Boni & Liveright, and they went into business for themselves. They increased the series' popularity, and in 1927 began publishing general trade books which they had selected "at random." Thus began their publishing business, which in time they named Random House. It used as its logo a little house drawn by Cerf's friend and fellow Columbia alumnus Rockwell Kent.

Cerf's talent in building and maintaining relationships brought contracts with such writers as William Faulkner, John O'Hara, Eugene O'Neill, James Michener, Truman Capote, Theodor Seuss Geisel, and others. He published Atlas Shrugged, written by Ayn Rand. Even though he vehemently disagreed with her philosophy of Objectivism, he admired her "sincerity" and "brillian," and the two became lifelong friends.

In 1933 Cerf won United States v. One Book Called Ulysses, a landmark court case against government censorship, and thereafter published James Joyce's unabridged Ulysses for the first time in the United States (one chapter had been published in a Chicago-based literary magazine, which had led to its being found "a work of obscenity"). In 1933 Random House, which had the rights to publish the book in the United States, arranged for a test case to challenge the implicit ban, so as to publish the work without fear of prosecution. It therefore made an arrangement to import the French edition of the book, and to have a copy seized by the United States Customs Service when the ship carrying the work arrived. Despite advance warning to Customs of the anticipated arrival of the book, the local official declined to confiscate it, stating "everybody brings that in." He and his superior were finally convinced to seize the work. The United States Attorney then took seven months before deciding whether to proceed further. While the Assistant U.S. Attorney assigned to assess the work's obscenity felt that it was a "literary masterpiece," he also found it obscene within the meaning of the law. The office therefore decided to take action against the work under the provisions of the Tariff Act of 1930, which allowed a district attorney to bring action. Cerf later presented the French-language book to Columbia University.

In 1944 Cerf published the first of his collection of joke books, Try and Stop Me, with illustrations by Carl Rose. A second book, Shake Well Before Using, was published in 1949.

In the early 1950s, while maintaining a Manhattan residence, Cerf bought an estate at Mount Kisco, New York, which became his country home for the rest of his life. A Mount Kisco street (Cerf Lane), which runs from Croton Avenue, is named after him. Cerf married actress Sylvia Sidney on October 1, 1935; they divorced seven months later (April 9, 1936). He married Hollywood actress Phyllis Fraser, a cousin of Ginger Rogers, on September 17, 1940. They had two sons, Christopher and Jonathan.

In 1959, Maco Magazine Corporation published what has since become known as "The Cream of the Master's Crop," a compilation of Cerf's jokes, gags, stories, puns, and wit.