Nothing Random: Bennett Cerf and the Publishing House He Built

Description

The “exhilarating” (The Boston Globe) story of the legendary Random House founder, whose seemingly charmed life at the apogee of the American Century afforded him a front-row seat to literary and cultural history in the making

“[A] big, beautiful biography . . . There’s a new Power Broker in town.”–The New York Times

“Feldman depicts a lost world, at times a lost paradise, when New York, Hollywood and the literary life were at their most glamorous and privileged.”–The Washington Post

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. But they didn’t know that the handsome, driven, paradoxical young man of the 1920s had vowed to become a great publisher and, a decade later, was. By then, he’d signed Eugene O’Neill, Gertrude Stein, and 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 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 to Broadway, TV, Hollywood, and 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 two hundred individuals, deeply researched archival material, and letters from private collections not previously available, this book brings Bennett Cerf to vibrant life, drawing book lovers into his world, finally laying open the page on a quintessential American original.
Binding Type: Hardcover
Author: Gayle Feldman
Published: 01/13/2026
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 9781400060276
Pages: 1072
Weight: 3.25lbs
Size: 2.10″ H x 9.30″ L x 6.50″ W

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.