Dear Scott/Dear Max (Hudson River Editions)

Many writers profited from Maxwell Perkins's ministrations. Most famously, the saintly editor hacked almost 300 pages out of Look Homeward, Angel, reducing Thomas Wolfe's debut to a (relatively) readable form. F. Scott Fitzgerald's work required much less in the way of major surgery. Yet as these letters reveal, the novelist and his editor had a highly productive correspondence, allowing Fitzgerald to bounce big-picture ideas off Perkins and exchange reams of literary gossip. Fitzgerald tends toward the earnest and apologetic: "If I ever win the right to any liesure [sic] again I will assuredly not waste it as I wasted this past time. Please believe me when I say that now I'm doing the best I can." And Perkins tends toward the downright prescient: "At any rate, one thing I think, we can be sure of: that when the tumult and shouting of the rabble of reviewers and gossipers dies, 'The Great Gatsby' will stand out as a very extraordinary book."