Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Nothing Random: Bennett Cerf and the Publishing House He Built

Nothing Random: Bennett Cerf and the Publishing House He Built

Feldman, Gayle

Hardcover

Biographies GeneralBusiness of Writing20th Century United States History

Publisher Price: $40.00

ISBN10: 1400060273
ISBN13: 9781400060276
Publisher: Random House
Published: Jan 13 2026
Pages: 1072
Weight: 3.25
Height: 2.10 Width: 6.50 Depth: 9.30
Language: English
A NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW EDITORS' CHOICE - The exhilarating (The Boston Globe) story of the legendary Random House founder, whose seemingly charmed life at the apogee of the American Century afforded him a front-row seat to literary and cultural history in the making

[A] big, beautiful biography . . . There's a new Power Broker in town.--The New York Times

Feldman depicts a lost world, at times a lost paradise, when New York, Hollywood and the literary life were at their most glamorous and privileged.--The Washington Post

At midcentury, everyone knew Bennett Cerf: witty, beloved, middle-aged panelist on What's My Line? whom TV brought into America's homes each week. But they didn't know that the handsome, driven, paradoxical young man of the 1920s had vowed to become a great publisher and, a decade later, was. By then, he'd signed Eugene O'Neill, Gertrude Stein, and William Faulkner, and had fought the landmark censorship case that gave Americans the freedom to read James Joyce's Ulysses.

With his best friend and lifelong business partner Donald Klopfer, and other young Jewish entrepreneurs like the Knopfs and Simon & Schuster, Cerf remade the book business: what was published, and how. In 1925, he and Klopfer bought the Modern Library and turned it into an institution, then founded Random House, which eventually became a home to Truman Capote, Ralph Ellison, Ayn Rand, Dr. Seuss, Toni Morrison, James Michener, and many more.

Even before TV, Cerf was a bestselling author and columnist as well as publisher; the show super-charged his celebrity, bringing fame--but also criticism. A brilliant social networker and major influencer before such terms existed, he connected books to Broadway, TV, Hollywood, and politics. A fervent democratizer, he published high, low, and wide, and from the Roaring Twenties to the Swinging Sixties collected an incredible array of friends, from George Gershwin to Frank Sinatra, having a fabulous time along the way.

Using interviews with more than two hundred individuals, deeply researched archival material, and letters from private collections not previously available, this book brings Bennett Cerf to vibrant life, drawing book lovers into his world, finally laying open the page on a quintessential American original.

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