(photo by Martha Kaplan)

Last night, legendary Knopf editor Ashbel Green died while at dinner with his wife, Elizabeth Osha, and friends near their Stonington, Conn., home. He was 84.

Mr. Green, who was known as “Ash,” started working at the publishing house in 1964 and went on to edit over 500 books by a stable of well-known authors, political figures and journalists such as Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Vaclav Havel, George H.W. Bush and Walter Cronkite.

To many in the publishing world, Mr. Green was one of the last of the old-style gentleman editors.

“You could hear his typewriter from anywhere on the floor,” said Paul Bogaards, director of publicity at Knopf. “He was a classic editor with a red pencil.”

“He was an editor’s editor,” said Knopf editor Gary Fisketjon. “Those kind of people are rare in any generation.

Born in 1928, Mr. Green graduated from Columbia College in 1950 and later earned a master’s in Eastern European history at Columbia University. He is a descendant of Presbyterian ministers; one of his ancestors, also named Ashbel Green, was the eighth president of Princeton in the early 1800s and an acquaintance of George Washington.

He began his career in publishing at Prentice Hall in publicity, and started as a managing editor at Knopf in 1964. He was promoted to senior editor and vice president at the publishing house in the early 1970s. Even after he retired in 2007, he remained up-to-date on the industry and stayed involved with his authors and colleagues.

“I really think that most editors wake up each day hoping they're going to find something they love," Mr. Green told the Missouri Review in 2000. "I have a real sense of excitement when a new writer comes in with a novel or a collection of stories or an idea for a political book--someone you feel has a fresh voice, whom you can publish with a lot of enthusiasm.”

Mr. Green was also known for helping young editors.

He was both a friend and mentor to Andrew Miller, who came to Knopf from Vintage to take over Mr. Green's stable of writers when Mr. Green decided to retire in 2007.

Mr. Green would invite Mr. Miller and their assistant over to his Upper East Side apartment for drinks about once a month—a kind of involvement with younger editors that is rare in book publishing.

“He was a mentor to me by example,” said Mr. Miller. “He never had a bad thing to say about anybody. He was unflappable. He handled bad news with equanimity. He handled authors and agents so well and was always so kind—which is harder than it seems.”

When Knopf vice president and senior editor John Siegel started at Random House in the 1980s, Mr. Green came into his office within five minutes and offered to take him to lunch.

“His default was to help young editors,” said Mr. Siegel, who remembered how Mr. Green would sometimes defer to him when it came to acquiring books that they both wanted.

“He was part of the fabric of this place. He was such a decent, decent man. The thing with Ash was that he always took the high road,” said Mr. Siegel, audibly upset.

Although Mr. Green’s death was sudden, he had struggled with diabetes and cancer and had recently been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease.

“The last few years weren’t easy, but he made it seem easy,” said Mr. Fisketjon.

A funeral will be held in Stonington this Sunday. A memorial service in the city is being planned for the fall.

Johnson.

Having worked on his exhaustive biography of Lyndon B. Johnson for almost three decades, Robert A. Caro has delivered the manuscript for the fourth installment, leaving only one more volume before the magnum opus is complete. The Passage of Power will be published by Knopf in May, continuing the story begun in The Path to Power (1982), Means of Ascent (1990) and Master of the Senate (2002). Mr. Caro has already won the Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award and the books have collectively sold more than 1 million copies. The first two volumes of the biography will also be released in e-book form on November 23.

A statement from Knopf describes the latest installment:

In The Passage of Power, Caro focuses on five crucial years in the life of Lyndon Johnson -- from late 1958 when he began campaigning for the presidency, to early 1964, after he was thrust into office following the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Based on interviews with primary sources and on thousands of original documents, Caro describes the volatile relations between Johnson and John F. Kennedy and his brother Robert. He writes of the years of frustration and humiliation Johnson endured as vice president.

"There will be a fifth volume, though we have no timetable for it yet, only the expectation that it will be as remarkable as the first four,” said Knopf chairman Sonny Mehta in the statement. (Here is also a nice story from the AP about the new book, which will be a modest 700 pages in length.)

As we also recently learned, Robert Caro's 1974 biography of Robert Moses, The Power Broker, will be made into a movie for HBO directed by Oliver Stone.

Knopf, which published Norwegian Wood in America on its Vintage paperback imprint, has responded with the following statement:

“We are disheartened to learn about the action by a New Jersey school district to remove a book from its required reading list due to objections from a group of concerned parents. The novel, NORWEGIAN WOOD by Haruki Murakami, was originally selected for the list based on suggestions by teachers, librarians, and administrators within the district, and the list was approved by the board of education. It is unfortunate the parents felt the need to dismiss such an important work of fiction and regrettable the school district would succumb to such pressure and disregard the recommendation of its own professional educators.”

"But why make it both fake and anonymous?" asked a critical thinker here at The Observer, when we posited that the blog might be similar in nature to the various Twitter feeds of former Observer editor Peter Kaplan (@crankykaplan, @wise_kaplan and @real_kaplan; @kaplan_premium, etc.) Tough questions. Questions we cannot answer.  The proprietor of the blog did not respond to our queries.

When we asked around, we did get one suggestion: that the blog might be satirizing what always struck us as one of the more endearing aspects of life in publishing. "Here’s a good topic: Occasionally Charming Old Assholes Who Remember the Good Old Days and the Assistants Who Worship Them," wrote one slightly grumpy editor. "The most annoying aspect of it (that I’ve seen) are the assistants who work for these people and relate their utterances with glee, and of course the people themselves, reveling in their canonization. This seems to happen a lot at Knopf." A Knopf spokesman did not respond to our request for comment.

Knopf president Sonny Mehta.

Lin.

As the foremost chronicler of the young novelist Tao Lin's every whim, The Observer was hoping we might break the story of Tao Lin's next book deal, which he announced he was shopping a couple weeks back. Then, on a Sunday when our moods were already dampened by incessant rain and the looming prospect of Monday, Mr. Lin wrote to inform us that we had lost the story to Mike Vilensky at The Wall Street Journal. So he granted us an interview.

"Mike 'scooped' the news via Clegg himself," read the e-mail from Mr. Lin we received in our inbox as Sunday turned into Monday, The Wall Street Journal went to the presses, and the rain thundered down. "Clegg" is Bill Clegg, Mr. Lin's agent at William Morris Endeavor. The announcement can be found here. The novel, entitled Taipei, Taiwan, will be released as a paperback on Vintage Books, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.

"Vintage/Knopf publishes most of my favorite writers: Lorrie Moore, Ann Beattie, Bret Easton Ellis," Mr. Lin told WSJ. And now Tao Lin.

So here is some stuff that is not in The Wall Street Journal: The book was sold for $50,000 with a $10,000 bonus if it earns out its advance, with one-third up front, one-third upon delivery of the manuscript and one-third upon publication in the U.S. and Canada. The proposal consisted of a 5000-word excerpt and a ~3-page outline. The other houses that made offers were Harper Perennial and Little, Brown. Tim O'Connell, who is an associate editor at Vintage and Anchor Books, will edit Mr. Lin. Mr. O'Connell was described by his new author as a "prolific Tweeter." Mr. O'Connell has Tweeted four times since March 2010.

Here is the rest of our exchange with Mr. Lin:

NYO: Did you get to go to meetings at the publishing houses?

TL: Yes, I met with 4 editors.

NYO: Who has the nicest office?

TL: Bloomsbury had the bleakest office, in my view. The other offices were all really nice.

NYO: Did Tim make the highest offer or was he the editor (and Vintage the publisher) you liked best?

TL: I liked everyone. Vintage didn't make the highest offer. I liked them best, based on a number of factors and with Bill's input.

NYO: Did you meet Sonny Mehta?

TL: I did not, but Tim and I talked about him. Tim spoke to him a number of times. Sonny had asked Tim which book by me he should read and Tim had said "Richard Yates," so Sonny may have read some or all of "Richard Yates."

NYO: Were you counseled against putting out a book proposal when everyone is on vacation (did they say "wait until September" or did you have to talk with any editors on Martha's Vineyard)?

TL: Everyone seemed very available, but I think mostly because of Bill's influence and enthusiasm. Bill highly exceeded my expectations at what an agent does or could do.

NYO: Do you feel now like you've "made it"?

TL: I honestly feel, to a large degree, like me and everyone else are close to death and that the awareness of this has, to me, precluded thoughts of "making it" (this is a theme of the novel).

Gates.

Robert Gates just retired from his job as secretary of defense. Now, of course, he is writing not one but two books.

The first, to be published in 2013, will be a memoir about his experience as the only secretary of defense to serve two different presidents from both parties while at war the entire time. The second, for 2014, will "focus on Gates's philosophy about leadership, his views about great leaders he has admired, and his thoughts about effective leadership, even in the face of adversity and difficulty." Fun.

While Gates was hired by George W. Bush, in opting to go with Knopf for his books instead of a conservative imprint it appears that his books will take a non-partisan approach (reasonable given his bi-partisan tenure in the office). Donald Rumsfeld, in contrast, published his memoir Known and Unknown with Penguin's conservative imprint Sentinel.

So when John Harris, editor in chief of The Politico, approached him last fall about writing a book on the Obama administration to be team-reported by the Politico staff, Mr. Bai said no.

The idea of a Politico book was briefly but seriously entertained shortly after the election, Mr. Harris said, after his agent, Scott Moyers of the Wylie Agency, raised the possibility, and Random House, Mr. Harris’ publisher, indicated they were interested. At first, Mr. Harris was thinking about writing the book himself, but it quickly became clear that a full-time writer would be needed. Mr. Harris said he did not ask any of his own staffers to do the job, though Mike Allen, Politico’s chief political correspondent, was going to have a “major role” as a reporter and writer.

“A book is damn hard work—sure, we can have people who are great reporters and have the place wired, but then you have to sit down and write the damn thing!” Mr. Harris said. “I knew I couldn’t do it and also run a publication at the same time, and I knew that none of the other people here could do it with their current jobs.”

Plus, the book offered an opportunity to hire a marquee long-form writer. “It would have been to get someone we’d want in our pages in the long term, and use it as a way to recruit them,” Mr. Harris said.

Several people were approached, among them Mr. Bai, who is currently under contract to write four covers per year and a column every three weeks for the New York Times Magazine. But the book died on the vine shortly after Mr. Bai turned it down: not only was Politico publisher Robert Albritton against it—he thought it would be a distraction—but there was also a worry that having a book in the works would force Politico’s reporters to choose between running with scoops as soon as they were ready and keeping them in their back pocket.

When reached by phone on the night of Monday, May 18, Mr. Bai declined to comment on the Politico project, but told us about the book he decided to write instead.

Tentatively titled The Great Distraction and scheduled for publication in mid-2011, this will be Mr. Bai’s first book for Knopf, where he will be edited by Jonathan Segal. Mr. Bai said the book will be about the baby boomer generation, and how in the realm of politics they “simply failed to meet the challenges that were pressing in on them” during the past 25 years.

Mr. Bai’s first book was a critical diagnosis of the Democratic party called The Argument, and was published to excellent reviews and widespread attention in 2007 by the Penguin Press.

Taking a break from a Yankees game and a deadline for the Times Magazine on Monday night, the 40-year-old Mr. Bai explained his approach to the new book by citing a piece of wisdom he learned from Roger Rosenblatt in journalism school: “Look away from the ball.” Which is to say, Mr. Bai hopes that by explaining the mistakes made by the last generation, he will explain what is at stake for the current one. 

“This is a book about how it went wrong,” Mr. Bai said of his new project. “There were a lot of things going on in American culture and technology during that generation’s formative years. A lot of things conspired to make our politics a lot less than it should have been, at a moment that demanded significant creativity.”

Though the book, like much of Mr. Bai’s magazine work, is motivated by an interest in generational change, the author said he sees himself as a reporter, not a historian.

“I’m not cut out to do the heavy historical lifting of poring through old yellowed documents in the Library of Congress,” he said. “I need to see the things that I write about, I need to see the people I write about. It’s a quirk. I can’t become obsessed with the non-living.”

He went on: “To me, this isn’t history—we’ve been spectators to and victims of an extraordinarily disappointing political era, and we should understand why. For me this is really about the future. You have to understand what went wrong so you can begin to untangle and reverse it.”

OK, so it’s not history, and not quite magazine journalism either. Maybe call it... reported narrative polemic?

“I'm not really a polemicist!” Mr. Bai said. “I'm never looking for a fight. I'm only looking to tell the story as I see it, so I tread carefully into that kind of ground. But I do think there's an important story that has to be told. We are leaving a moment, and it's a defined moment, and I think people haven't quite gotten their heads around it yet. We've just turned the page on a pretty ignoble era of politics.”

Mr. Bai said he intends to tell his story through a handful of figures who fascinate him, such as two-time presidential candidate Gary Hart.

“He was really a visionary political thinker,” Mr. Bai said. “And I think what was lost there was symbolic of what was lost in the larger sense—when politics became less hospitable to flawed people, or when the nature of all politics started to drive away a lot of talented, creative people.”

Mr. Bai acknowledged that a book in which Gary Hart is one of the main characters is “not the intuitive book to do” at a moment as self-consciously historic as ours. "Certainly all the attention is on the President and Washington and what's happening now," Mr. Bai said. "It's a little risky to ask people to take a step back in their minds."

He said his agent, Sarah Chalfant of the Wylie Agency, might have preferred at one point that he write a book more narrowly focused on Mr. Obama, which a number of other top political journalists are doing.

One can’t blame Mr. Bai for eyeing that crowd and taking his ball to a different court. Among the heavyweights working on Obama books are the New Yorker’s Ryan Lizza and Newsweek’s Jonathan Alter, who are both writing accounts of the new administration’s first year; New Yorker editor David Remnick, who is focusing on race; and The Washington Post’s David Maraniss, who is writing a comprehensive biography. All that’s on top of a biography of Obama’s father by Boston Globe reporter Sally Jacobs that’s coming from Public Affairs, the three big-ticket campaign tick-tocks coming from Crown, HarperCollins, and Viking, and several works-in-progress on the administration’s handling of the economic crisis.

lneyfakh@observer.com

John Cheever was inordinately fond of the word “inestimable”: It shows up twice in the brief preface to The Stories of John Cheever (1978), the best seller that pushed him at last to the top of the heap (he was now king of the short story, while Saul Bellow ruled over the novel); and again in the first story of the collection, “Goodbye, My Brother,” written in 1950, when Cheever was not yet 40:

“Oh, what can you do with a man like that? What can you do? How can you dissuade his eyes in a crowd from seeking out the cheek with acne, the infirm hand; how can you teach him to respond to the inestimable greatness of the race, the harsh surface beauty of life; how can you put his finger for him on the obdurate truths before which fear and horror are powerless?”

He liked the word and the word suits him: There’s something inestimable about his work, a magic that defies measurement. And the sorrow and loneliness of his inner life—that, too, is inestimable, even though all the relevant information is now on the table: Blake Bailey’s definitive biography, Cheever (no one will ever want to know more about this particular life), and the two-volume Library of America edition of Cheever’s work (edited by Mr. Bailey). Posterity will make its judgment about his place in the canon; meanwhile, we can admire a prodigious and mysterious achievement—and contemplate, for as long as we can bear, the misery from which it sprung.

“RARELY HAS A GIFTED and creative life seemed sadder,” wrote John Updike when The Journals of John Cheever were published in 1991, nine years after the author’s death. Before that we’d been privy to The Letters of John Cheever (1988), edited by his son Ben, and Home Before Dark (1984), a frank memoir by his daughter, Susan. The combination of those three volumes should have prepared us for a uniquely depressing life story—and yet it’s still a shock to realize, halfway through Mr. Bailey’s biography, that the grimness will not abate, that the successful writer who in 1964 has his face on the cover of Time magazine (“Ovid in Ossining”), the genial and charming John Cheever with his famous “childlike sense of wonder,” is desperately unhappy and destined to become more so.

Already in 1964, during what he had to admit was an “extraordinary run of luck,” he was drinking heavily before any public appearance, so as to keep a smile fixed on his face—“and afterward,” Mr. Bailey writes, “he felt so ashamed of himself that he drank more.” Cheever confided in his journal: “I feel like a remorseful masturbator holding his aching, softening cock in one hand while sperm runs down the wall paper like the white of an egg.” Yes, that is the tone of his intimate confessions, which is one reason why I chose to quote that passage, another being that it links his shyness, his remorse, his sexuality and his drinking—four demons that tormented him for most of his life.

Loneliness and alienation were the keynotes of his dismal childhood in Quincy, Mass., and his sense of his own isolation persisted into his 20s, when he was a hungry young writer in Depression-era New York. “The thing I miss most,” he wrote, “is an ability to identify myself with a group.” You would have thought that marriage in 1941 to the long-suffering Mary Winternitz would begin to heal the rift, and that the birth of his first child in 1943 would finish the job. No such luck. A year after he’d settled his young family into a suburban enclave in Westchester, Cheever wrote in his journal, “Every indifferent glance, every back turned by chance, every hint of indifference, real or imagined, sinks into my breast like an arrow dipped in poison.” In fact, his new role as a family man only made matters worse. Despite his yearning for a “Norman Rockwell image,” he thought of himself as “a pariah—a small dirty fraud … a spiritual and sexual impostor.”

Ah, yes—the matter of what he called his “contested sexual identity.” “[F]lesh lusteth contrary to the spirit”—that, writes Mr. Bailey, is “surely the major theme of Cheever’s work as well as his life.” To put it bluntly, Cheever had sex with boys as a boy and with men as a young man. He seems to have desisted for the first 20 years of his marriage, but temptation (the promptings of his “wayward cock”) plagued him: “If I followed my instincts, I would be strangled by some hairy sailor in a public urinal. Every comely man, every bank clerk and delivery boy, was aimed at my life like a loaded pistol.”

And when he did eventually succumb, he was “consumed,” according to Mr. Bailey, “with an almost suicidal self-loathing.” The vicious cycle that persisted for at least three decades spins roughly like this: His dread of being found out—exposed as an impostor—drove him to drink, which led to impotence and undermined his marriage, which drove him to drink, with the same result or worse. And so on.

IT'S TOO NEAT TO suggest, as Cheever himself did, that his “contested” sexuality could be sublimated in his writing (“I know my troubled nature and have tried to contain it along creative lines”). When Cheever discovered in the late ’70s that a literary scholar had written a dissertation in which the author’s secret bisexuality unlocks the hidden meaning of his work, Cheever mocked the notion in his journal with withering sarcasm: “In order to conceal my homosexuality I married, made my wife miserable and bitter and finally rose to greatness in my last novel [Falconer] by admitting my love for cock.”

For me, the experience of reading Cheever is not appreciably enhanced by an intimate familiarity with the sordid details of his romps with men (and women), or by learning that his libido remained rampant even when he was terminally ill with cancer (in Mr. Bailey, oddly, this information “excites awe and even a trace of envy”). Nor does it help to have followed day by day the arc of his worsening alcoholism, which reached its nadir in 1975, when he very nearly succeeded in drinking himself into a shabby grave. (“I keep reading biographies of Fitzgerald,” Cheever wrote in the sodden mid-60s, “and I always get to bawling at the end.”)

Mr. Bailey’s research is impeccable and exhaustive—a mighty feat, though sometimes a mixed blessing for a reader oppressed by the weight of stubborn fact and the ticktock march of seamless chronology. Fortunately, Mr. Bailey’s encyclopedic knowledge of the particulars of Cheever’s unhappiness has not clouded his appreciation of Cheever’s writing; the commentary on the work is judicious and nuanced.

I also admired the confident sketches of a large and fascinating supporting cast, among them Malcolm Cowley, William Maxwell, Saul Bellow, Updike and Allan Gurganus. Harold Brodkey makes a couple of cameo appearances, and earns this memorable Cheever put-down: “I think of Brodkey in St. Louis, falling in love with himself because there was no one else so intelligent handsome and rich in the neighborhood; and how bitter this marriage was.” (Lines like that show off the brilliance of the journals—that massive monument, to borrow Mr. Bailey’s phrase, “of tragicomic solipsism.”)

AS IF THE LIFE weren’t sad enough, Mr. Bailey delivers in his epilogue dispiriting news of slumping sales figures: Cheever isn’t read much these days. One hopes that this biography and the Library of America edition will spark a revival.

Sorrow and hope, joy and bleakest despair—Cheever was a virtuoso when it came to hitting the high and low notes of the human scale, sometimes in dazzlingly tight sequence. (Think of “The Swimmer” and the extraordinary emotional landscape Neddy Merrill traverses on his aquatic cross-county journey.)

Let me leave you with a little taste (also aquatic: Cheever loved the water), a typical New Yorker story from 1959, “The Golden Age,” about Seton, a television writer who wishes he were a poet and has brought his family to a seaside village in Italy—“because he wants to lead a more illustrious life”:

“He dives, and swims through a school of transparent fish, and farther down, where the water is dark and cold, he sees a large octopus eye him wickedly, gather up its members, and slip into a cave paved with white flowers. There, at the edge of the cave he sees a Greek vase, an amphora. He dives for it, feels the rough clay on his fingers, and goes up for air. He dives again and again, and finally brings the vase triumphantly into the light. It is a plump form with a narrow neck and two small handles. The neck is looped with a scarf of darker clay. It is broken nearly in two. Such vases, and vases much finer, are often found along that coast, and if they are of no value they stand on the shelves of the café, the bakery, and the barbershop, but the value of this one to Seton is inestimable—as if the fact that a television writer could reach into the Mediterranean and bring up a Greek vase were a hopeful cultural omen, proof of his own worthiness.”

Adam Begley is at work on a biography of John Updike. He can be reached at books@observer.com.

That was the most extreme scenario floated whenever agents and other publishing people put their heads together over the past month and a half to speculate about the possible outcomes of last month’s Random House reorganization. Would Doubleday have to share Knopf’s publicity department? Would its marketing team be crowded out by Knopf’s? Would Knopf chairman Sonny Mehta, in deciding who stays and who goes, be naturally inclined to keep the people he’s used to working with and saddle the Doubleday team with the brunt of the layoffs?

Answers came this morning in the form of staff-wide memos from Mr. Mehta and Knopf president Tony Chirico. Consensus formed quickly, within the building and without: it is so not as bad as it could have been.

Several agents who spoke to the Observer on background said it looked to them like Doubleday was going to remain Doubleday—a major relief, since the last thing agents want is to have one less place to submit their projects to. As one agent put it after reading the memos, "Everyone seems accounted for."

Make no mistake, Doubleday has already suffered two substantial rounds of layoffs in recent months—one back in November that was worth 16 bodies, and the other right before Christmas reportedly worth more than 20—but the fact is, today’s announcement does about as little damage as anyone could have hoped to Doubleday’s autonomy, and leaves just about intact the imprint’s editorial staff, its marketing team, and its publicity department.

Cuts did happen today, certainly, and though Paul Bogaards—promoted in the course of the re-org to E.V.P. and executive director of publicity, promotion, and media relations for the Knopf Doubleday Group—would not say which departments were affected, word is that art and Web marketing were among them.

Which is to say nothing of Janice Goldklang, who worked at the Knopf Group for almost 30 years before being laid off last week and leaving the Pantheon imprint, where she spent the past 12 years, without a publishing director. One wonders if eliminating her position gave Mr. Mehta the flexibility to go easier on Doubleday.

“The takeaway here is there remains a tremendous amount of editorial continuity and in fact overall continuity within our group,” Mr. Bogaards said, while conceding that there had been a “minor staff reduction.”

Meanwhile, over at Broadway Books, which used to be Doubleday’s sister imprint before being plopped into the Crown Group as part of the reorganization, it looks like all the top dogs remain safe and sound, with deputy publisher Michael Palgon, editor-in-chief Stacy Creamer, publicity director David Drake, and executive editor Charlie Conrad all holding onto their jobs counter to expectations that one or more of them would see his/her position eliminated.

The announcement had been in the works for some time: last week, Knopf director of publicity Paul Bogaards called Mr. Asher and asked him to prepare a statement about his decision. Here's what he got: "I will miss the day to day interaction with my Vintage Anchor family. At the same time, I am thrilled to be working with the best hardcover team in publishing."