As Ever Yours

"Maxwell E. Perkins, famed editor of such literary luminaries as F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Zora Neale Hurston, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, and Thomas Wolfe, was a man whose personal and professional lives often intersected. Nowhere is this more evident than in his correspondence with Elizabeth Lemmon, the Virginia socialite who became his long-distance confidante. Despite the platonic nature of their relationship, others realized the intensity of their connection. The letter contained in As Ever Yours, published here for the first time, reveal an epistolary love story - and they provide fresh insights into Perkins the man and Perkins the editor." "As Ever Yours contains 121 of Perkins's letters to Lemmon as well as the 20 extant letters from Lemmon to Perkins; the rest are presumed lost or destroyed. Letters from Fitzgerald and Wolfe also shed light on the pair's dynamic relationship." "The letters make for compelling reading as Perkins details his personal life in New Jersey and Connecticut and his professional life in the New York publishing world. The writers he discovered, edited, and encouraged at Charles Scribner's Sons emerge as endearing and believable characters, brought to life in Perkins's vivid narrative voice. He is witty, self-deprecating, and painterly in his descriptions of people and locales together with the social milieu of his day. Protected by distance, Max used his letter-writing relationship to unburden himself in a way he could not with his coworkers, his authors, or even his wife - and these letters simultaneously highlight his editorial judgment and disclose his private feelings." "Edited by Rodger L. Tarr, As Ever Yours will be important to students and scholars of the history of publishing. The Perkins-Lemmon letters illuminate the thoughts and experiences of the greatest literary editor of the twentieth century."--Jacket.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Nonfiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.