(Letters make the most interesting reading, especially oth...)
Letters make the most interesting reading, especially other people's. This anthology is the product of many years of intensive research and collecting on the part of the editor. Each letter is prefaced with a biographical prelude and a summary of the historic background behind the correspondence. Among the over 120 letters herein, read as Alexander the Great announces to Darius, King of Persia, that he alone has dominion over the earth; Beethoven writes to his Immortal Beloved; Michelangelo negotiates with the Pope over the Sistine Chapel; Christopher Columbus reports his first impressions of America to the Court of Spain; Dostoyevsky describes his sensations in the minutes before he was to be executed; Thomas Mann writing in 1937 hurls his defiance against Hitler and the Nazi regime. Here then are love letters, taunting letters, shocking letters, letters dipped in honeyed phrases, letters written with words of gall, bombastic letters, letters breathing fire, letters with good news, letters that spelled disaster, passionate letters, secret letters, casual letters, gushing letters, impulsive letters, grandiloquent letters, crafty letters, short letters, voluminous letters, letters of courage, letters of hatred, letters of adoration, letters of fury, letters that people forgot to burn, letters that people did not dare to send, letters that glorified literature, thundering letters, tender letters, inspired letters, diabolical letters, letters that made history.
Max Lincoln Schuster, more commonly known as Max Schuster, was an American book publisher and editor.
Background
Max Lincoln was born on March 2, 1897 in Kalusz, Austria, the son of Barnet Schuster, who ran a stationery and cigar store in New York City, and Minnie Stieglitz, United States citizens who brought Schuster to New York City when he was several weeks old.
Education
Schuster attended De Witt Clinton High School in Washington Heights, where he acquired a strong interest in Abraham Lincoln and adopted Lincoln as his middle name. In 1913 he entered the Pulitzer School of Journalism at Columbia University and received a Bachelor in Literature in 1917.
Career
After high school Schuster became a copyboy at Joseph Pulitzer's New York Evening World.
While at Columbia, he edited the radical undergraduate magazine Challenge, wrote magazine articles, and served as college correspondent for the Boston Evening Transcript.
After graduation Schuster became Washington correspondent for the New Republic News Service (later the United Press). With the entrance of the United States into World War I, he became chief of the publication service of the United States Treasury Department's Bureau of War Risk Insurance. He was later named publicity director for the Navy Liberty Loan and Victory Loan campaigns.
After demobilization, Schuster became an assistant to philosophy professor Walter B. Pitkin at Columbia. He also edited the trade journal of the Motor and Equipment Manufacturers Association.
In 1921, Schuster met Richard L. Simon, a piano salesman who had stopped by his office for a potential sale. While in the office, Simon noted a book by Romain Rolland on Schuster's desk and a common interest in the publication grew into a discussion about the author and initiated a friendship that lasted until Simon's death in 1960. Simon and Schuster continued on separate career paths until late 1923, when, with a capitalization of $4, 000 each, they decided to start a publishing business.
In January 1924, the partners opened a one-room office on West Fifty-seventh Street. Their first publication project was a crossword puzzle book, which by the end of the year had sold 375, 000 copies and left the new firm of Simon and Schuster with a handsome profit.
In 1926, Schuster contacted Will Durant, a Columbia University professor, and convinced him to write a book entitled The Story of Philosophy. The volume sold over a half million copies. That book was followed a year later by Ethelreda Lewis' Trader Horn, recommended by Clifton Fadiman, one of their editors; it sold 170, 000 copies. The partnership continued to succeed, with the publication of self-help books and publications directed at bringing cultural works to the general public, many of which sold in the millions, such as Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People (1938).
Schuster was the "idea" man for the firm and took part in manuscript selection and rejection. While serving variously as president, editor in chief, and chairman of the board for the firm over the years, Schuster found time to write several books. His first, Eyes on the World (1935), was a photographic record of the year 1934. In 1940 he compiled A Treasury of the World's Greatest Letters, from Ancient Days to Our Own Time. The volume was a best-seller and was chosen as a book dividend by the Book-of-the-Month Club. In 1941 a second volume of the Treasury was published.
In 1939, Schuster, Simon, and Leon Shimkin joined Robert Fair De Graff in establishing Pocket Books, a company specializing in the publication of paperbound books. The first ten titles included classics, mysteries, self-help books, poetry, and a Pulitzer Prize-winner, Thornton Wilder's Bridge of San Luis Rey. Begun with a capitalization of $30, 000, Pocket Books was sold in 1944 to Field Enterprises for $3 million. On October 1 of the same year, Simon and Schuster was also sold to Field Enterprises, headed by Marshall Field III, a millionaire department-store magnate. From 1944 to 1957, Schuster and Simon alternated as president and board chairman of the firm.
In 1957, Simon left the firm, and Shimkin and Schuster bought back the firm from Field Enterprises. With a 50 percent interest in the company, Schuster acted jointly with Shimkin as chief executive officer. Nine years later, Schuster sold his interest to Shimkin for a reputed $2 million. Barred by an agreement at the time of sale from publishing for two years, Schuster bided his time.
In 1968 he began an editorial partnership with his wife, named M. Lincoln Schuster and Ray Schuster Publishing and Editorial Research Associates, which was in operation until his death.
Schuster was active in civic affairs and served on the board of trustees of the Montefiore and New York Jewish hospitals.
Schuster was a member of the Bibliographic Society of America, the Book Table, the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Newspaper Readers, the Wednesday Culture Club That Meets on Fridays, and the Shakespeare Fellowship.
Personality
Quotes from others about the person
Korda described how Schuster, "understood, as very few people in publishing have, the power of simple ideas. Nobody was better at inventing books that filled a need, or at describing them with the kind of enthusiasm that sold them in quantity, or at breaking down the reasons for buying them into one-line sentences. "
Connections
In May 1940, Schuster married Ray Haskell; they had no children. Ray had three daughters from a previous marriage.