At Random was published by Random House in 1977, six years after Bennett Cerf’s death. The book was assembled from extensive tape-recorded reminiscences that Cerf had made in his final years, supplemented by correspondence and documents from his files, and it reads with the spontaneity and warmth of a man talking to friends — which is essentially what it is. The editor was not credited on the title page, but the shaping hand is evident: the anecdotes are well-chosen, the chronology is clear, and the tone is unmistakably Cerf’s — ebullient, generous, name-dropping without malice, and possessed of the natural storyteller’s instinct for the revealing detail.
Bennett Cerf (1898–1971) was the most visible American publisher of the twentieth century. He co-founded Random House with Donald Klopfer in 1927, built it from a small reprint house (they had purchased the Modern Library from the failing firm of Boni & Liveright) into a major trade publisher, and for twenty-five years appeared weekly on the television panel show What’s My Line?, making himself the only publisher in America whom ordinary people could recognize on sight. His story is inseparable from the story of American publishing in its golden age.
The autobiography covers the great publishing events of Cerf’s career: the decision to fight the obscenity ban on Joyce’s Ulysses (which Random House won in the landmark 1933 ruling by Judge John M. Woolsey), the signing of William Faulkner (who came to Random House in 1936 and stayed for the rest of his career), the acquisition of Sinclair Lewis, Eugene O’Neill, Truman Capote, John O’Hara, James Michener, and Dr. Seuss. Cerf tells these stories with characteristic modesty about his own role — he presents himself as lucky rather than shrewd, gregarious rather than calculating — but the cumulative picture is of a publisher with excellent taste, genuine love of literature, and extraordinary skill at managing difficult personalities.
The book is also a social history of New York literary life from the 1920s through the 1960s. Cerf’s anecdotes about the Algonquin Round Table, about Hollywood in the 1930s, about the postwar literary scene, and about the early days of television are told with the practiced timing of a man who had been entertaining dinner parties for fifty years. Some of the stories have been told elsewhere, but Cerf’s versions are usually the best — he had been present at most of the occasions he describes, and his memory for dialogue was exceptional.
The portrait that emerges is of a man who genuinely loved books and writers, who treated publishing as a form of patronage as well as a business, and who understood that the publisher’s job was to find good writers and then leave them alone. In an era when publishing has become increasingly corporate and risk-averse, At Random reads as an elegy for a lost world.
Collecting At Random
First edition (Random House, New York, 1977): Cloth with dust jacket. Published posthumously.
Market values:
- First edition in dust jacket: $15–$40
- Later editions: $5–$10