Celebrated literary editor Robert Gottlieb has died aged 92.
His career was launched with Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 and continued for decades with Pulitzer Prize-winning classics like Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Robert Caro’s The Power Broker.
He died of natural causes on Wednesday at a New York hospital, Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group said.
Caro, who worked for decades with Gottlieb on his Lyndon Johnson biographies and was featured with him last year in the documentary Turn Every Page, said in a statement that he had never worked with an editor so attuned to the writing process.
“From the day 52 years ago that we first looked at my pages together, Bob understood what I was trying to do and made it possible for me to take the time, and do the work, I needed to do,” Caro said in a statement.
“People talk to me about some of the triumphant moments Bob and I shared, but today I remember other moments, tough ones, and I remember how Bob was always, always, for half a century, there for me.
“He was a great friend, and today I mourn my friend with all my heart.”
Gottlieb helped shape the modern publishing canon.
His credits included fiction by future Nobel laureates Morrison, Doris Lessing and VS Naipaul; spy novels by John le Carre, essays by Nora Ephron, science thrillers by Michael Crichton and Caro’s nonfiction epics.
He also edited memoirs by Katharine Hepburn, Lauren Bacall and Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham, whose Personal History won a Pulitzer.
Gottlieb so impressed Bill Clinton that the former US president signed with Alfred Knopf in part for the chance to work with Gottlieb on his memoir My Life.
