Comment

May 08, 2017voisjoe1_0 rated this title 4 out of 5 stars
Max Perkins, editor of Charles Scribner's Sons publishing firm, works with author Thomas Wolfe, helping him to become a best selling author of two novels. Since Perkins spent many months eliminating hundreds (even thousands?) of pages of excess verbiage, he asks in the film, "Does an editor help an author to improve his book or does he help the author to write a different book." I have recently read "To Kill a Mockingbird" and "To Set a Watchman," two versions of the same novel. Reading these two highly accessible novels, one can see that the editor helped the author write a largely different and improved story, as "To Set a Watchman" was a very beginning writer's novel and the editor had to dig out the real meat of the story and guide the author to write a very different, better story.