"This collection of letters brings together for the first time the entire known correspondence - nearly 700 letters, notes, and wires - of the preeminent twentieth-century American editor and his Pulitzer Prize-winning author." "While the letters reveal an intimate portrait of the literary and personal friendship of Maxwell Perkins and Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, they also constitute a history of the Scribner publishing house from 1930 to 1947, when Perkins died. Rawlings, awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1939 for The Yearling, was one of the Scribner stars in an era when publishing was difficult for women writers. Perkins was her champion, offering editorial opinion, a week-by-week critique of her work, and candid gossip about other writers he nurtured, most notably Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Thomas Wolfe." "Perkins and Rawlings brought magic to their correspondence. Though four years passed before they used each other's first name, their attraction was immediate and mutual: they shared a sense of humor, concerns about health, discreet details about their marriages, a weakness for the bottle, and, at times, agonizing fits of despair." "Rawlings wrote not just to Perkins but for him. He responded - to both her life and her work - with wisdom, clarity, and generosity."--BOOK JACKET.