Robert Gottlieb

Robert Adams Gottlieb (born April 29, 1931) is an American writer and editor. From 1987 to 1992 he was the editor of The New Yorker.

Personal

Robert Gottlieb was born in New York City to a Jewish family in 1931 and grew up in Manhattan. During his childhood, he "was your basic, garden-variety, ambitious, upwardly mobile, hard-working Jewish boy from Brooklyn. I was bound to go beyond my parents. It was simply the way things were.”

Gottlieb graduated from Columbia University in 1952, and spent two years at Cambridge University before joining Simon & Schuster in 1955 as an editorial assistant to Jack Goodman, the editor-in-chief.

He is married to Maria Tucci, an actress whose father, the novelist Niccolò Tucci, was one of Gottlieb's writers. They have two children: Lizzie Gottlieb, a film director, and Niccolò (Nicky). Nicky has Asperger syndrome and is the subject of one of his sister's documentary films Today's Man.

Career

Gottlieb joined Simon & Schuster in 1955 and within ten years rose to editor-in-chief. Gottlieb discovered and edited Catch-22 by the then-unknown Joseph Heller. In 1968, Gottlieb along with Nina Bourne and Anthony Schulte moved to Alfred A. Knopf. Gottlieb left in 1987 to succeed William Shawn as editor of The New Yorker, staying in the position until 1992. Gottlieb returned to Alfred A. Knopf as editor ex officio.