The return of a man called Perkins
The literary editor behind the greatest works of Ernest Hemingway and F Scott Fitzgerald is to feature in a new biopic
By John Walsh, The Independent
Thursday, 5 August 2010

 The publishing editor – traditionally a fussy, gnomish individual with a balding pate and pebble glasses, who inhabits a dusty backroom in his publishers' basement and holds forth with passion on the role of the semi-colon or the iniquity of the dangling modifier – is not usually considered a romantic or heroic kinda guy. He may know all about plot structure, about character consistency and impeccable grammar, but he's unlikely to be considered a sex god or alpha male. Unless, that is, he's Maxwell Perkins (pic left, Rex Features).

In American publishing circles, Perkins, who died in 1947, is spoken of with trembling reverence. He acted as midwife to some of the greatest masterpieces of US literary history, most especially The Great Gatsby and The Sun Also Rises. He befriended, and earned the trust of, writers with the god-like status of Ernest Hemingway, Thomas Wolfe and F Scott Fitzgerald. And now he's about to be immortalised on the silver screen, played (probably) by Sean Penn.

It's not the first time his filmic canonisation has been planned. Ever since the biographer A Scott Berg's excitable life, Max Perkins: Editor of Genius, won a National Book Award in 1978, rumours have flown about film adaptations. In 2008, a script by John Logan was being shown around, and Lawrence Kasdan, director of Body Heat and The Big Chill and writer of Raiders of the Lost Ark and Clash of the Titans, was set to direct; but the money didn't work out. Now the producer and financier Bill Pohlad will direct the Logan script, with Berg, the biographer, in the executive producer's chair. Pohlad has worked with Penn on three occasions and is expected to reel him in to play the fedora-wearing editor-in-chief.

Why Perkins? What was so special about the man who spent the best part of the Jazz Age reading typescripts and explaining to people that their plot was in the wrong order? He was born in New York City in 1884, went to school in New Hampshire and graduated in economics from Harvard. After working for the New York Times as a reporter, he joined Charles Scribner's Ltd, the country's most distinguished publishing house, in 1910, initially as advertising manager.

Keener to work with younger talents than the company's traditional-minded authors (who included Henry James and Edith Wharton), he signed up Fitzgerald in 1919, in the teeth of his older colleagues' disapproval. The working title of Fitzgerald's debut was The Romantic Egoist. Under Perkins's careful attentions, it was radically revised, retitled This Side of Paradise and published in 1920, a watershed in American letters.
Full story at Independent