A spirited and revealing memoir by the most celebrated editor of his timeAfter editingThe Columbia Review, staging plays at Cambridge, and a stint in the greeting-card department of Macy's, Robert Gottlieb stumbled into a job at Simon and Schuster. By the time he left to run Alfred A. Knopf a dozen years later, he was the editor in chief, having discovered and editedCatch-22andThe American Way of Death, among other bestsellers. At Knopf, Gottlieb edited an astonishing list of authors, including Toni Morrison, John Cheever, Doris Lessing, John le Carré, Michael Crichton, Lauren Bacall, Katharine Graham, Robert Caro, Nora Ephron, and Bill Clinton—not to mention Bruno Bettelheim and Miss Piggy. InAvid Reader, Gottlieb writes with wit and candor about succeeding William Shawn as the editor ofThe New Yorker, and the challenges and satisfactions of running America's preeminent magazine. Sixty years after joining Simon and...