The story of the legendary Random House founder, whose seemingly charmed life at the apogee of the American Century featured a front-row seat on history, an epic cast, and left an enduring cultural legacy At midcentury, everyone knew Bennett Cerf: witty, beloved, middle-aged panelist on What's My Line? , whom TV brought into America's homes each week. They didn't know the handsome, driven, paradoxical young man of the 1920s who'd vowed to become a great publisher, and a decade later, was. By then, he'd signed Eugene O'Neill, Gertrude Stein, William Faulkner, and had fought the landmark censorship case that gave Americans the freedom to read James Joyce's Ulysses . With his best friend and lifelong business partner Donald Klopfer, and other young Jewish entrepreneurs like the Knopfs and Simon & Schuster, Cerf remade the book business: what was published, and how. In 1925, he and Klopfer had bought the Modern Library and turned it into an institution, then founded Random House, which eventually became a home to Truman Capote, Ralph Ellison, Ayn Rand, Dr. Seuss, Toni Morrison, James Michener, and many more. Even before TV, Cerf was a bestselling author and columnist as well as publisher; the show super-charged his celebrity, bringing fame - but also criticism. A brilliant social networker and major influencer before such terms existed, he connected books-Broadway-TV-Hollywood-politics.

A fervent democratizer, he published "high," "low," and wide, and from the roaring twenties to the swinging sixties collected an incredible array of friends, from George Gershwin to Frank Sinatra, having a fabulous time along the way. Using interviews with more than 200 individuals; deeply researched archival material; and letters from private collections not previously available, this book recalls Bennett Cerf to vibrant life, bringing booklovers into his world and time, finally giving a true American original his due.