Robert Gottlieb

I first heard of him while reading Ben Yagoda's terrific history of The New Yorker, "About Town: The New Yorker and the World It Made."

I was bummed when I learned a few weeks ago that Robert Gottlieb, editor extraordinaire, had passed away at age 93.

I knew of him from his role as book editor, at Random House and later Knopf, before he became the third editor of The New Yorker.

But I first heard of him while reading Ben Yagoda's terrific history of The New Yorker, "About Town: The New Yorker and the World It Made", and the circus around his being named as legendary editor William Shawn's successor. If you're interested, it's worth checking out to see how S.I. Newhouse mismanaged the entire deal.

Later, John McPhee wrote about Gottlieb and his approach to editing him at the magazine in one of a series of articles McPhee wrote about 10 years ago or so.

Gottlieb is most noted for being a legendary book editor for some of the biggest and best writers in history — Joseph Heller, John le Carré, Toni Morrison, Salman Rushdie; Bob Dylan, John Lennon, and Paul Simon; Lauren Bacall, Sidney Poitier, and Katharine Hepburn.

He also edited Robert Caro's "The Power Broker", a giant book about Robert Moses, more than 1,344 pages in length (or 66 hours on Audible, for me.) And they duo teamed up for Caro's five-part biography of Lyndon Johnson. (Caro is working on the fifth book now.)

Last year, Gottlieb's daughter produced a documentary about the relationship between her dad and Caro. The film, "Turn Every Page – The Adventures of Robert Caro and Robert Gottlieb", is a delight and one of the few documentaries I've ever seen in a theater ... I say without pride.

Check out this trailer for the documentary and this week's episode of The New York Times Book Review Podcast, which remembers Cormac McCarthy and Gottlieb.