No mainstream publisher of the twentieth century was more famous than Bennett Cerf (1898 – 1971), the cofounder of Random House. Other Jews, like Alfred A. Knopf, produced more elegant volumes (in the Borzoi imprint). Knopf could also boast of a more eminent international list (including Albert Camus, Joseph Conrad, Kahlil Gibran, D. H. Lawrence, and Thomas Mann). But under Cerf’s direction, Random House published American authors from Nobel laureates like William Faulkner and Eugene O’Neill to postwar luminaries like Ralph Ellison and Philip Roth. From the 1920s to the 1960s, Cerf was unmatched in the myriad ways he managed to reach readers — whether through the blockbuster bestsellers of James Michener and Ayn Rand, the true-crime thrillers like Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood (1966), the charm of “Dr. Seuss” (Theodor S. Geisel), or joke books like Try and Stop Me (1944), which the publisher himself authored. Cerf also loomed above his peers like Dick Simon and Max Schuster, Horace Liveright, and Harold Guinzburg because of television. On the Emmy-winning What’s My Line? (CBS), panelists like Cerf entered millions of homes every Sunday evening. Only a small minority of their bookshelves brandished James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), for which Cerf and his founding partner, Donald Klopfer, had secured legal protection. But had Random House done nothing else besides installing into its Modern Library the greatest novel of the century, dayenu.
Gayle Feldman’s account of United States v. One Book Called “Ulysses” (1933) constitutes an especially stirring chapter in a volume packed with dazzlingly described episodes and engrossing portraits, based on research for which the adjective “exhaustive” could have been coined (though it barely seems adequate). Her narrative gifts make mid-Manhattan publishing downright exciting. Feldman interprets Cerf’s career as singular. His Modern Library imprint made available the heritage of Western civilization. He hired the talent and absorbed the enterprises associated with the next generation — Jason Epstein, Robert Bernstein, James Silberman, Robert Gottlieb, André Schiffrin. No wonder then that the British novelist Ford Madox Ford, while admitting that “I don’t like Jews,” noticed after visiting New York that they were “the only people I have found [there] … who really loved books.” Cerf’s own ethnic ties had loosened, however, after reading a transliterated Torah portion at his bar mitzvah. Though a visit to Mandatory Palestine moved him deeply, his two sons were raised as Presbyterians.
Emerging from the “people of the book,” Cerf deployed shrewd marketing to make his luckiest authors prosperous. Although his unabashed show-business savvy leaves Feldman uneasy, one measure of the importance of the world she lavishly evokes occurred in 1960, when the New York Times emblazoned the merger of Random House and Knopf across three columns on the front page.
Stephen Whitfield is Professor of American Studies (Emeritus) at Brandeis University. He is the author of Learning on the Left: Political Profiles of Brandeis University (2020).
