the IT editor

[Peter Petto]

from Entertainment Weekly's IT list:

IT EDITOR Gerald Howard

AGE 50 WHY HIM? He discovered David Foster Wallace. Brought Irvine Welsh's 
Trainspotting to America. Convinced colleagues to publish Chuck Palahniuk's 
Fight Club and last month's Choke. He reissued Richard Farina, edits Gore 
Vidal, and had to reschedule this interview to lunch with Don DeLillo. 
Don't be fooled by the tweed: This cat, currently curled up in a Doubleday 
Broadway office, is cool. BOOK THAT CHANGED HIS LIFE "I read Catch-22 when 
I was 13. It made me a weirdo in high school, but it helped in my adult 
life." ON THE DEATH OF EDITING "A bald untruth. I know many editors who 
care about their books as deeply as you can, who work like dogs to get them 
into the best shape possible." HERO Cork Smith, Howard's coworker at Viking 
Press. "He was Thomas Pynchon's editor...and I was a card-carrying member 
of the Pynchon underground." SECRET EGO TRIP "I like to go into bookstores 
and see which of the books I've done are still in print. I don't generally 
have best-sellers, but they stick around." NEXT Q: The Autobiography of 
Quincy Jones, whose subject nicknamed the editor Bix (as in trumpeter 
Beiderbecke). "A nickname from Quincy Jones, that trumps everything."