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...pantheon through the good offices of television and Joe Miller's joke book. "Bennett," says one fellow publisher, "is not an intellectual. He's not a literary man. He's an entrepreneur, an impresario." But that is only the surface of Cerf. Explains Epstein: "Bennett runs Random House as a conservative branch of show business. The company is vulgar to a degree. But what makes the difference with Bennett is how important he feels it is to have Philip Roth and William Styron on the list. Some other publisher would know a thousand ways to get rich...
...around him New York was bursting with bright, talented people; his friends and former classmates were men such as Composers Howard Dietz, Oscar Hammerstein and Richard Rodgers. The theater and Tin Pan Alley were his passions. Says Donald Klopfer, 64, Cerfs Columbia classmate and now vice chairman of the Random House board of directors...
...binding glue. Cerf rounded up Donald Klopfer, put the arm on his Wall Street uncle, and snapped up the Modern Library, smell and all, for $200,000. Within three years, Klopfer and Cerf, having retired their debts, decided to branch out by publishing a few new books at random. Thus was Random House born...
...swooping down on the agents who represented two of Liveright's most famous authors, Eugene O='Neill and Robinson Jeffers. While they haggled, Cerf piled into "a rickety plane," flew to Sea Island, Ga., and signed up O'Neill. Ah, Wilderness! soon became the first major Random House book. "And then," says Cerf brightly, "I took a train to Carmel, Calif., and signed up Jeffers." Shortly after that he went to England and called upon George Bernard Shaw, who had always refused to let his plays be included in anthologies. When Cerf cannily ob served that...
...fashion new materials for educational use. Radio Corp. of America, for example, recently bought Random House (Cerf and his staff retain full editorial control, however). RCA presumably plans to utilize Cerf's textbook division for electronics developments in education...