What an amazing man Max Perkins was. A giant among editors - I think possibly the last of the breed of true gentlemen who saw editing as a "calling" rather than an occupation. Brilliant biography, meticulously researched and jam packed with fascinating vignettes of Perkins's most famous authors - Hemingway, Scott Fitzgerald, Tom Wolfe and many others. A small cross-section of the wealth of advice Perkins gave his writers which is still so relevant today:

"Generalizations are no use - give one specific thing and let the action say it …"
"When you have people talking, you have a scene. You must interrupt with explanatory paragraphs but shorten them as much as you can. Dialogue is action …"
"You can't know a book until you come to the end of it, and then all the rest must be modified to fit that."
"If an author worried too much about plot … he might become 'sort of muscle-bound,'whereas he must be flexible'. 'A deft man may toss his hat across the office and hang it on a hook if he just naturally does it … but he will always miss if he does it consciously."