Charles Scribner III – författare

Scribners tells the inside story of five generations--over 150 years--at the legendary publishing house of Charles Scribner's Sons, beginning with its founding in an unused chapel in downtown New York through its golden era on Fifth Avenue above the famous landmark bookstore down to the present-day. The author, the fifth of the Charleses to work at that house of celebrated authors, provides here an inside view--"between the covers" of illustrious and notorious books--of the family members, editors, and authors of this colorful literary history. Among the writers who illuminate this story we find in the early years Robert Louis Stevenson, Rudyard Kipling, Henry James, Edith Wharton, Teddy Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, John Galsworthy and the artists Charles Dana Gibson, N. C. Wyeth, and Maxfield Parrish, who illustrated Scribner's Magazine as well as Scribner books. Then with the arrival of "editor of genius" Max Perkins, the story takes off into the heights of twentieth-century fiction with Scott Fitzgerald, Thomas Wolfe, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, Marcia Davenport, Alan Paton, James Jones and--above all--Ernest Hemingway, that most loyal and enduring author whose works were published by four generations of Scribners. Famous children's classics The Wind in the Willows, Peter Pan, and The Yearling also take their place of honor in the firm's contribution to new generations of readers.This engaging personal account of family history--both in and out of the office--includes the most colorful controversies: from Mussolini and Trotsky to Lindbergh and C. P. Snow--as well as behind-the-scenes adventures of the author's father as he navigated the seas with industry storms and publishing corsairs before finding a safe harbor at Macmillan and finally, after the demise of tycoon Robert Maxwell, Simon & Schuster. The author, an art historian, found himself for thirty years in the company of writers by "an accident of birth." But it proved an adventure beyond his reckoning, here told with the candor and informality of a family gathering, as well as with humor and affection for his father, P. D. James, Louis Auchincloss, Andrew Greeley, and other authors with whom he worked personally. As Scott Fitzgerald wrote, "If it wasn't life, it was magnificent."

Join a literary insider for a behind-the-scenes tour of art heists, opera icons, and the golden age of publishing.From the author of Scribners: Five Generations in Publishing comes this new collection of personal essays reflecting on the past fifty years of his pursuits and passions in literature, art, and music. Beginning with a memoir of his father’s tutelage through letters to a young son away at school, it moves along to his “dual professions” on parallel tracks—book publishing and art history.Behind-the-scenes stories of famous Scribner authors F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and Thomas Wolfe give way to the section on Scribner’s forte, the art of the Baroque masters: a murderous Caravaggio and the two tycoons Rubens and Bernini.From his role in a sting operation to recover a stolen Rubens painting on Miami Beach to his personal profiles of three luminous sopranos—Dame Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, Frederica von Stade, and Mary Costa—Scribner shares a fascinating peek into the life and loves of a Renaissance man.