From TheBestLinks.com
Bennett Cerf photographed by Carl Van Vechten, 1932
Bennett Alfred Cerf (May 25, 1898 - August 27, 1971) was a publisher and founder of Random House, also known for his own compilations of jokes and puns, for regular personal appearances lecturing across the United States, and for his television appearances in the panel game What's My Line?.
Biography
Bennett Cerf was born and brought up in New York City, where he attended the same public school as Richard Rodgers. He received his B.A. from Columbia University in 1919 and his Litt.B. in 1920 from its School of Journalism.
On graduating, he worked briefly as a reporter for the New York Herald Tribune, and for some time in a Wall Street brokerage, before becoming vice president of Boni and Liveright, publishers.
In 1925 Cerf and his childhood friend Donald Klopfer bought from Boni and Liveright The Modern Library and went into business for themselves. In 1927 they started to publish general trade books selected "at random". Thus began their formidable publishing business, Random House. It used as its logo a charming litle house drawn by Cerf's friend Norman Rockwell.
Cerf's talent in building and maintaining personal relationships brought contracts with writers such as William Faulkner, John O'Hara, Eugene O'Neill, James Michener, Truman Capote, Theodor Seuss Geisel, and others among the greatest writers of the day, who supported Random House just as Random House suported them.
During the Great Depression, while maintaining a Manhattan residence, Cerf acquired inexpensively an estate at Mount Kisco, New York, which became his country home for the rest of his life.
In 1934, Cerf won a landmark court case against government censorship, and published James Joyce's unabridged Ulysses for the first time in the United States. For critics' opinions of the book to be admissible as evidence, it was necessary to have them seized with it by the U.S. Customs. Reviews were pasted into a special copy, which was duly imported and seized; Cerf later presented it to Columbia University.
Recognising a need for humorous reading during World War II, Cerf produced the first of many compilations of other people's jokes under the title Try and Stop Me. It was a runaway success, and he continued with similar compilations for the rest of his life.
Cerf married in 1936 actress Sylvia Sidney, but the couple soon divorced. He married secondly Phyllis Fraser, the cousin of Ginger Rogers, and had two sons, Jonathan and Christopher.
Related links
Top visited
0 of
0 links
[no links posted yet]
>> place link >>
Discussion
Last posted
0 of
0 messages
[no messages posted yet]
>> post message >>
Watch
You can
add this article to your own "watchlist" and receive e-mail notification about all changes in this page.
