In the Company of Writers

This is an informal and high-spirited memoir of a life spent among writers, many of them leading figures of 20th-century literature, such as Hemingway, Scott Fitzgerald and Max Perkins. It is an intimate view of the pre-conglomerate era of publishing, a world of Dickensian personalities, monotype presses and oak-and-glass cubicles, and of how that world was transformed after World War II into an industry of mass-market paperbacks, in which Hollywood and agents increasingly dominated a once-genteel profession. Charles Scribner sets out to describe these changes, not with nostalgia, but with candour and clarity.
 
This is an informal and high-spirited memoir of a life spent among writers, many of them leading figures of 20th-century literature, such as Hemingway, Scott Fitzgerald and Max Perkins. It is an intimate view of the pre-conglomerate era of publishing, a world of Dickensian personalities, monotype presses and oak-and-glass cubicles, and of how that world was transformed after World War II into an industry of mass-market paperbacks, in which Hollywood and agents increasingly dominated a once-genteel profession. Charles Scribner sets out to describe these changes, not with nostalgia, but with candour and clarity.