Career
Gottlieb discovered and edited Catch-22 by the then-unknown Joseph Heller. He served as editor-in-chief of Simon & Schuster and Alfred A. Knopf, which he left in 1987 to succeed William Shawn as editor of The New Yorker, staying in the position until 1992.
Gottlieb has edited novels by John Cheever, Salman Rushdie, John Gardner, Len Deighton, John le Carré, Ray Bradbury, Elia Kazan, Margaret Drabble, Michael Crichton, Mordecai Richler and Toni Morrison, and non-fiction books by Barbara Tuchman, Jessica Mitford, Robert Caro, Antonia Fraser, Lauren Bacall, Liv Ullman, Sidney Poitier, John Lennon, Paul Simon, Bob Dylan, Bruno Bettelheim, Carl Schorske, and many others.
Gottlieb rejected John Kennedy Toole's initial manuscript of A Confederacy of Dunces. Gottlieb reportedly liked the manuscript, but certain aspects of it ran afoul of the editor's Late Modernist middlebrow sensibilities. Toole refused the changes and eventually committed suicide in 1969. After Toole's death, his mother, Thelma Toole, in conjunction with author Walker Percy, 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.
Read more about this topic: Robert Gottlieb
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