Gayle Feldman on Bennett Cerf in conversation with Heather Clark

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Bennett Cerf co-founded Random House in the 1920s; by the 1960s, it was the greatest literary publisher in the U.S. There was nothing random about this American original who changed our culture by straddling books, Broadway, Hollywood, and TV.

This event is FREE and open to the public. Registration is required.

Bennett Cerf co-founded Random House in the 1920s; by the 1960s, it was the greatest literary publisher in the U.S. There was nothing random about this American original who changed our culture by straddling books, Broadway, Hollywood, and TV.

At midcentury, everyone knew Bennett Cerf: witty, beloved, middle-aged panelist on What’s My Line? whom TV brought into America’s homes each week. But they didn’t know that the handsome, driven, paradoxical young man of the 1920s had vowed to become a great publisher and, a decade later, was. By then, he’d signed Eugene O’Neill, Gertrude Stein, and William Faulkner, and had fought the landmark censorship case that gave Americans the freedom to read James Joyce’s Ulysses.

With his best friend and lifelong business partner Donald Klopfer, and other young Jewish entrepreneurs like the Knopfs and Simon & Schuster, Cerf remade the book business: what was published, and how. In 1925, he and Klopfer bought the Modern Library and turned it into an institution, then founded Random House, which eventually became a home to Truman Capote, Ralph Ellison, Ayn Rand, Dr. Seuss, Toni Morrison, James Michener, and many others.

Feldman brings Bennett Cerf to vibrant life, drawing book lovers into his world, finally laying open the page on a quintessential American original.

Gayle Feldman has written for Publishers Weekly for forty years. Since 1999, as U.S. correspondent for The Bookseller, she has analyzed the American book business for U.K. readers. She has contributed features, reviews, and essays to The New York Times, The Times of London, The Nation, and others. She is the author of the cancer memoir You Don’t Have to Be Your Mother, published by W. W. Norton, and also Best and Worst of Times: The Changing Business of Trade Books, published through a National Arts Journalism Program fellowship at the Columbia Journalism School. The National Endowment for the Humanities has supported her work on Nothing Random with a Public Scholar award. Feldman lives in New York City.

Heather Clark is the author of four books on postwar poetry, most recently Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath, one of the New York Times Ten Best Books of 2021, as well as a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Her recent awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship, NYPL Cullman Center Fellowship, and a Leon Levy Biography Fellowship. She holds a doctorate in English literature from Oxford University, and lives outside New York City.

Further reading: Random House’s press release for Nothing Random.