“I might be considered a much more distinguished publisher if I hadn’t had so much fun on the side.”
These words were spoken with the confidence of a man who knows he is the subject of an Esquire feature. His photo catches him mid-laugh, brown eyes squinting behind horn-rimmed glasses, salt-and-pepper hair slicked back. The bookman looked the part of a raconteur. He added a quip: “Ask the average man how many publishers he knows by name—it’ll be Bennett Cerf.”
It was true. In 1953, a decade earlier, Cerf had profiled Marilyn Monroe for the same magazine—a feature written with the casual tone of someone writing about a fellow star.
Counting its front and back pages, Gayle Feldman’s new biography of Cerf, Nothing Random, clocks in at a hair under a thousand pages. The book contains a 12-page key to major characters and nearly 150 pages of double-columned notes. Such expanse is unsurprising. Cerf co-founded Random House in 1927, and when a publisher releases the story of its patriarch, thoroughness is to be expected.
As Cerf confidently proclaimed, he was one of a kind, a literary paradox. For 16 years, millions of Americans had watched him on Sunday nights on the TV show “What’s My Line?” He collected jokes, puns and riddles into books that sold more than five million copies. When he was only 27, he and his business partner, Donald S. Klopfer, bought the Modern Library from Horace Liveright.
Random House came two years later. Cerf’s authors included luminaries ranging from Truman Capote to Gertrude Stein to Dr. Seuss. Cerf was consequential in publishing some of the most important writers and books of the 20th century, among them the U.S. edition of James Joyce’s Ulysses, Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man and Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint. He counted Nobel Prize winners in his roster.
In today’s atomized literary culture, the idea of a longtime editor-writer relationship is rare—not to mention a writer loyal to a publisher. Cerf’s biography is a window into the past of American literary culture.
Feldman is the perfect writer for the job. On staff at Publishers Weekly for 40 years, she knows book culture inside and outside the covers. Feldman basks in the light of Cerf’s literary star, but her book isn’t a hagiography. The volume mostly earns its length, although some sections are replete with namedropping and asides that momentarily lose the focus. (Feldman worked on the book for over 20 years. One can only imagine the amount of material she accumulated.) The best sections of the biography are about the business of books and their writers.
Feldman unpacks Cerf’s paradoxes. She ascribes his success to his flexibility:
It’s precisely because Cerf was open to so many worlds, high and low, mass and class; and to so many people—he loved being a New York switchboard to the famous, but also took pleasure in chatting with all the regular Joes and Janes—that he accomplished so much.
Columbia University was the early crucible for Cerf’s wit; there he learned “how to write amusingly and fast for publication,” a skill that he later turned into popular newspaper and magazine columns and the occasional jacket copy. He talked to the right people and talked to them well. He read widely and documented his reading in his diaries. His entries document “the excitement of a mind opening to the possibilities and worlds in them, and of quick, instinctive reactions that would serve him well later on.” Although Cerf was publicly playful, he was ultimately all business: “He never wasted time; competed fiercely to win,” Felman writes, “always wanted more; was never satisfied with himself.”
He had to be tough on himself, because the literary culture was unforgiving. As Feldman notes, young Jewish men like Cerf and Liveright couldn’t rise in the “generally antisemitic old [publishing] houses,” so they “had to start companies themselves.” The going wasn’t easy. In the early days of Modern Library, before air conditioning, Cerf and company would use castor oil to “cure” their covers (“the fake leather bindings had been a selling point”), but the materials “went rancid in humid heat.” In the summer, the publishing office, as Klopfer said, “stank to high heaven.”
But the victories started to accumulate. One particular win was for both the publishing house and the literary culture. James Joyce’s novel Ulysses had originally been serialized in The Little Review from 1918 through 1920, but the following year the book was banned in the United States. Cerf, eying the book for American publication, contrived a seizure by U.S. customs, leading to an infamous censorship trial. Random House won. Cerf was thrilled and used the controversy to move books.
Feldman affirms Cerf’s devotion to the “three cardinal rules of bestseller promotion,” which include “an ounce of imagination pre-publication is worth a pound of advertising after a book is out; advertising sells a book that’s already selling; a bestseller is helped by strokes of luck—the publisher’s job is to know when and how to exploit them.”
The house was successful, to be sure, but not infallible. Random House readers rejected the work of a young John Cheever—who seemed to be a risk—two months before he published his first story in The New Yorker. In the decade to come, Random House would pass on books by other eventual greats: Elizabeth Bishop, Bertolt Brecht, Karel Capek, Martha Gellhorn, Anaïs Nin, Flann O’Brien and Jean Rhys.
Cerf could be honest about his own missteps. When Eugene O’Neill wrote his most Catholic play, “Days Without End,” Cerf wanted endorsements from the church. O’Neill knew the folly in such direct ecclesiastic support. “No, I certainly cannot consent,” O’Neill wrote to the publisher. “Lay off the Catholic stuff!” Feldman is correct to note that O’Neill’s acceptance of Catholic mysticism was different from institutional allegiance. Cerf, she notes, “didn’t mind being told he was wrong, as long as he could offer opinions.”
Another Catholic Cerf valued was St. Thomas Aquinas. A two-volume selection of his works was planned, the goal being to print 10,000 sets and sell enough in five years to “recoup the investment.” Cerf, though, hadn’t realized that “every Jesuit school in the country was waiting for an edited version of the saint’s words. Within three weeks, all 10,000 sets were sold.” A monsignor at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York soon “offered to sell enough of the Church’s own paper to make another 5,000 sets,” ultimately leading to a most unusual next act: Random House purchased part of the regal Villard Houses behind the cathedral. One editor, Jason Epstein, told Cerf’s wife that he “felt like he was in heaven.”
Cerf valued his relationship with Random House authors and was a frequent correspondent. “Such epistolary conversation knitted relationships with the faith and attention writers need to thrive,” Feldman notes, “but Bennett also craved their approbation.”
Some, like James Michener, noticed Cerf’s advice could be both perceptive and sly. “Whenever you go into a strange town, stop at the bookstore,” Cerf advised. “Tell the owner and especially the clerks how much you appreciate their support, because they’re the ones who keep you alive.” Cerf told Michener to autograph all copies of the books in the store and say it was “for their special customers,” but also because “then they can’t ship the unsold books back to us.” Cerf was both a man of the people and a man who understood the people.
In 1962, Random House lost a giant: Nobel Prize winner William Faulkner died at 64. Cerf and Klopfer hopped on a plane in New York, along with William Styron, then a rising young novelist. Once they landed in Memphis, Styron saw a woman staring at the group—actually, one in particular. “Bennett Cerf! You’re Bennett Cerf,” she yelled. “Good Lord God, never thought I’d meet you.”
The woman asked why Cerf was in Memphis. Cerf replied he was there for William Faulkner’s funeral.
The woman responded: “William who?”
This article appears in April 2026.
Politics
Faith
Culture
Vatican
Scripture
Podcasts