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BRUCCOLI, MATTHEW J. and JUDITH S. BAUGHMAN, eds. The Sons of Maxwell Perkins: Letters of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Thomas Wolfe, and Their Editor. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2004. xxxiii + 361 pp. $29.95.
With numerous volumes of correspondence of these four literary figures readily available, one may wonder what purpose the letters collected in The Sons of Maxwell Perkins might serve. Yet by presenting them together, and focusing them on the writings and literary biographies of the authors, this approach sheds new light on the role of Maxwell Perkins as editor and mentor to three of the best American novelists in the first half of the twentieth century. To achieve this focus, the editors have "cut unessential material from the letters-business matters and commentary on nonliterary topics" (xiv), scrupulously noting location and number of words omitted.
Furthermore, the work of Maxwell Perkins is unique in American letters, and because of changes in the publishing world, unlikely to be replicated in the future. Most of even the best-read literary enthusiasts and scholars can recall the name of only this one editor. Perkins sat at the very center of the American literary establishment during his thirty-three-year career at Charles Scribner's Sons; his own list of authors included not only Fitzgerald, Hemingway and Wolfe, but also Ring Lardner, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, Edmund Wilson, S.S. Van Dine, Douglas Southall Freeman, Will James, Taylor Caldwell, Hamilton Basso,...