Registration

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Description

Gayle Feldman’s new biography and cultural history, Nothing Random: Bennett Cerf and the Publishing House He Built, includes a long chapter on the role Bennett Cerf, the cofounder of Random House, played in liberating James Joyce’s Ulysses and establishing it as part of the literary canon. The fight to publish the novel legally in America is a quintessential New York story. Ninety-three years ago, on December 6, 1933, in a Manhattan courtroom, Judge John Munro Woolsey issued the landmark decision. Mounting and winning the court case put Random House, a young upstart of a company, on the map. Cerf, his business partner, the two lawyers who fought the case, a sympathetic prosecutor, and the essential, behind-the-scenes go-betweens who helped bring Cerf and Joyce together, were all New Yorkers. Feldman will relate how, through hard work, inspired archival detective work, sheer luck, and knowing the proclivities of her subject, she was able to uncover new information on the role the go-betweens played in putting Joyce's Ulysses into the hands of the right publisher at the right time, who was then able to put it into the hands of waiting readers. 

About the Author

Gayle Feldman has written for Publishers Weekly for forty years, including as a senior staff editor; since 1999, as U.S. correspondent for The Bookseller, she has analyzed the American book business for U.K. readers; and she has contributed features and reviews on books and culture to The New York Times, The Nation, The Daily Beast, and other publications. Her essays have appeared in The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, The Philadelphia Inquirer, and The Times of London. She is the author of the cancer memoir You Don’t Have to Be Your Mother, published by W. W. Norton, and was awarded a National Arts Journalism Program fellowship at Columbia University, through which she published Best and Worst of Times: The Changing Business of Trade Books. The National Endowment for the Humanities has supported her work on Nothing Random with a Public Scholars award. She lives in New York City and Sag Harbor.