The National Book Award winner from the #1 New York Times bestselling author, A. Scott Berg.

The talents he nurtured as an editor were known worldwide: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Thomas Wolfe, and numerous others. But Maxwell Perkins remained a mystery, a backstage presence who served these authors not only as book editor extraordinaire but also as critic, career manager, money-lender, psychoanalyst, father-confessor, and friend.

This outstanding biography, a winner of the National Book Award, is the first to explore the fascinating life of this editor extraordinaire—in both the professional and personal domains. It tells not only of Perkin’s stormy marriage, endearing eccentricities, and secret twenty-five-year romance with Elizabeth Lemmon, but also of his intensely intimate relationships with leading literary lights of the twentieth century. It is, in the words of Newsweek, "an admirable biography of a wholly admirable man."