Nothing Random

“An engrossing and intimate story of Bennett Cerf’s incredible publishing journey through the American Century . . . Gayle Feldman has crafted a sweeping intellectual history with a stunning cast of characters. . . . A scintillating biography that reveals the inner struggles of a great publishing house. Feldman’s is a stunning achievement.”—Kai Bird, Pulitzer Prize–winning co-author of American Prometheus

“Few people know more about the publishing business than Gayle Feldman, whose analytic eye is tempered with a warm heart. This incisive but sympathetic portrait explains why Gertrude Stein (of all people) said that Cerf was ‘the only publisher I will ever love.’”—Amanda Vaill, bestselling author of Pride and Pleasure: The Schuyler Sisters in an Age of Revolution

“A monumental biography . . . Bennett Cerf didn’t just publish books—he shaped American culture. Come for the Ulysses free speech case, stay for the boozy late nights with Frank Sinatra.”—Heather Clark, Pulitzer Prize finalist and author of Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath

“Cerf lived a larger-than-life life. This is the biography the great publisher deserves—a Lucullan feast of a book, meticulously researched, elegantly written, and filled with boldfaced names. For all its appropriate heft, it’s a page-turner.”—James Kaplan, bestselling author of Frank: The Voice and Sinatra: The Chairman

“Authoritative and always entertaining, Nothing Random is like being a guest at one of Cerf’s legendary dinners, where authors met Broadway composers and TV celebrities and no one went home early.”—Joseph Kanon, former book editor and bestselling author of Istanbul Passage and Shanghai

“The visionary publisher who became a TV star everyone knew . . . Nothing Random has the reader racing through the pages. Cerf was a whirlwind, and hats off to a biographer who keeps pace with him.”—Molly Haskell, critic and author of Frankly, My Dear: Gone with the Wind Revisited

“This cinematic biography . . . teems with a star-studded cast . . . Drawing on Cerf’s personal archive, as well those of writers he worked with, and more than 200 interviews, Feldman paints a candid portrait of one of the giants of modern publishing, who emerges as a charming, humorous man who was open to ‘many worlds, high and low, mass and class’ and committed to his authors. This is monumental.”—Publishers Weekly, starred review

“[An] engaging biography of the man who was at the center of the American publishing scene—and ubiquitous in many other venues—for half a century . . . A well-crafted life of a publisher whose world spanned culture high and low, and whose influence endures.”—Kirkus Reviews

“When we think of the glory days of American publishing, with its domineering, swashbuckling editors and (very) well paid superstar novelists making $2 a word for short stories, we are thinking of a world built by Bennett Cerf . . . Not only does Gayle Feldman’s definitive biography highlight Cerf’s literary instincts it also reveals a canny businessman who understood how to make books a part of America’s burgeoning, mid-century celebrity culture, making the likes of Truman Capote and James Michener into household names.”—LitHub