In the fall of 1983, I came to New York City from Colorado to work in the book business, and found a job as a publicity assistant at Viking Penguin. I was twenty‑seven, on the older side for someone starting in publishing. I ended up staying with the company for four decades. Within a couple of years, I was a publicist for Viking and found myself working with the likes of Bruce Chatwin, Don DeLillo, Paul Auster, William Trevor, John Ashbery, James Welch, Iris Murdoch, William Kennedy, and Fay Weldon.
I spent the first half of the 1990s as the director of publicity for Viking, and then became an editor for the imprint. As an editor I was generally allowed to follow my interests, which included everything from literary fiction and memoir to science and cultural history, and over the last three decades I had the enormous privilege of bringing into the world books by T.C. Boyle, Roddy Doyle, Rebecca Solnit, Elizabeth Gilbert, Geraldine Brooks, Amor Towles, Sue Monk Kidd, A.M. Homes, William T. Vollmann, David Byrne, and Robert Macfarlane, among many others. I also looked after the paperback backlist of many writers who were at the core of Viking’s history, including Jack Kerouac, Ken Kesey, Peter Matthiessen, Don DeLillo, and Iris Murdoch.
Applied to Covici, the term “editor” needs a bit of qualification.
Over the years I became a sort of unofficial historian for Viking. There were others before me, including Elisabeth Sifton and Gerald Howard. I was the one who knew something about who the founders were and who the legendary editors were, the one who could tell those stories. Over my forty years at the company, I continued to dig more deeply into the history of Viking when I had the time. I would never tire of poking my nose into the old editorial files or spending time in the corporate library (which was more or less intact all the way back to the mid‑1920s, though some valuable books appear to have been lifted).
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Viking entered one of its several golden periods when Pascal Covici joined the editorial staff in 1937. Covici was born in Botosani, Romania, in 1888, and brought to the United States when he was twelve years old. In 1922 he opened a bookshop in Chicago known as Covici‑McGee, and the same year became a book publisher under that name. The imprint’s name was changed to Pascal Covici in 1925, and Covici continued to publish under this name until 1928, when he was joined by Donald Friede and moved to New York to run Covici‑Friede. The firm fell on hard times and was bought by Viking. One of the authors that Covici brought along with him to Viking was a young writer named John Steinbeck; his company had published Steinbeck’s novellas Tortilla Flat in 1935 and Of Mice and Men in 1937.
Covici was a larger‑than‑life figure who was universally beloved. Malcolm Cowley noted “the big shoulders, the clear blue eyes under white hair, the hand on one’s arm, the piratical slouch of his brown hat, the bold features breaking into a smile, the slow chuckle that became a booming laugh, the drawer on his desk that opened as he reached for a cigar.” Covici would edit Saul Bellow, Arthur Miller, Lionel Trilling, Ludwig Bemelmans, Marianne Moore, Joseph Campbell, Shirley Jackson, and Gene Fowler, among many others. When he passed away in 1964 at the age of seventy‑five, The New York Times in its obituary said he was “known throughout publishing as a buoyant man with limitless sympathy and a gift for getting the best from writers.”
Applied to Covici, the term “editor” needs a bit of qualification. As Tom Guinzburg put it, “He didn’t edit. Covici was that other kind of editor. He was the hand‑holder, he was the psychologist. Pat did not work on books, he worked on people. His blue pencil wasn’t the most effective tool that he used—it was his lovely personality.” He called Covici “an extraordinary man, and he was the first editor I ever knew—one of the few I ever knew—who instinctively understood what the correct relation is of an editor to his publisher. It didn’t matter which of Covici’s authors were being discussed, whoever it was, that writer was the most important writer in the world at that moment.”
Any writer would love to have an editor like that! The first book that Viking published with Steinbeck was a collection of short stories set in California, The Long Valley, in September 1938. The reviews were generally mixed: The New York Times Book Review wrote that “as a group they are neither profound nor passionate stories of great stature. Yet all have one rare, creative thing: a directness of impression that makes them glow with life, small‑scale life though it is.” It sold modestly at best.
Steinbeck’s next book for Viking was something else again. The Grapes of Wrath, released in April 1939, became one of the most famous novels that Viking ever published, as well as one of its all‑time bestselling books. Set during the Depression, the novel chronicled the dust bowl migration of the 1930s and told the story of one Oklahoma farm family, the Joads, who were driven from their homestead and forced to travel west to the promised land of California. A portrait of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless, the novel captured the horrors of the Great Depression and probed into the very nature and quality of justice in America. The novel was inspired by Steinbeck’s journalism work, particularly for The San Francisco News, which had commissioned him to cover migrant labor camps in the Salinas valley. The Grapes of Wrath won the Pulitzer Prize (the first novel published by Viking to win one) and was the main focal point when Steinbeck won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1962. A celebrated Hollywood film version, starring Henry Fonda and directed by John Ford, arrived in 1940.
According to The New York Times, The Grapes of Wrath was the bestselling book of 1939, and some 430,000 copies of the novel had been printed by February 1940 (which must have put quite a strain on Viking’s printers at the time). The novel is still widely read, with life‑to‑date sales estimated at 14 million copies. One Steinbeck scholar, John Timmerman, has claimed that it “may well be the most thoroughly discussed novel—in criticism, reviews, and college classrooms—of twentieth‑century American literature.” The novel was also quite controversial, publicly banned and even burned by citizens when it was first published. The critic Bryan Cordyack has written that “Steinbeck was attacked as a propagandist and a socialist from both the left and the right of the political spectrum. The most fervent of these attacks came from the Associated Farmers of California; they were displeased with the book’s depiction of California farmers’ attitudes and conduct toward the migrants. They denounced the book as a ‘pack of lies’ and labeled it ‘communist propaganda.’”
The Grapes of Wrath was not the only legendary book published by Viking during this time. The year 1939 also saw the publication by Viking of James Joyce’s final novel, Finnegans Wake, surely one of the most difficult (and perhaps most unread) novels in the Western canon. Written over a period of seventeen years, the novel was composed in an idiosyncratic style that blended standard English with neologisms and puns in multiple languages. Viking was clearly excited about the publication; an ad it placed in Publishers Weekly called it “obviously the year’s most unusual literary event,” and in a twist on the modern midnight‑release party it offered to send to booksellers an LP recording that had been made of Joyce reading from the novel so that they could invite customers to tea and to listen to the new Joyce release on publication day.
While the initial reception of Finnegans Wake was largely negative and ranged from utter bafflement to open hostility (even Huebsch, Joyce’s editor, admitted that he never read it), the novel eventually came to assume a preeminent place in world literature. Anthony Burgess has called it “a great comic vision, one of the few books of the world that can make us laugh aloud on nearly every page,” and Viking helped the cause of its comprehension by publishing, in 1944, the first in‑depth study and analysis of the novel, A Skeleton Key to “Finnegans Wake,” written by the famed mythologist Joseph Campbell and Henry Morton Robinson.
Several other authors of great note began their association with Viking at this time. With Brighton Rock (1938), Graham Greene started a long list of publications with Viking that included The Confidential Agent (1939), The Labyrinthine Ways (1940, republished in 1946 under its better‑known British title, The Power and the Glory), and The Heart of the Matter (1948). Viking would go on to publish more than a dozen works by Greene, including his prescient Vietnam novel, The Quiet American (1956), and his very last novel, The Captain and the Enemy, in 1988. As Tom Guinzburg later related, “Graham had never been a huge seller. [His] literary distinction and literary reputation were not matched by his sales in this country. He never understood it and it used to irritate him a great deal.” Guinzburg spoke of him as “a great ladies’ man, and very fastidious and shy, but very certain of his movements.”
Another prominent Viking author of this time was the British novelist, journalist, literary critic, and travel writer Rebecca West (1892-1983). West had already established her reputation as a spokeswoman for feminist and socialist causes and as a critic, writing impressively in many genres; she debuted on the Viking list in 1936 with The Thinking Reed, a novel about the corrupting influence of wealth. Perhaps her best‑known book was Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (1941), a nearly twelve‑hundred‑ page examination of the history, people, and politics of Yugoslavia, structured around a trip she made to that country in 1936.
It made great commercial sense for the second volume in the series to be an anthology of Steinbeck’s work, and it was put together by Pascal Covici.
The book was hailed as a magnificent blend of travel journal, cultural commentary, and historical insight that probed the troubled history of the Balkans and the uneasy relationships among its ethnic groups. Viking continued publishing West’s work well into the 1980s, including her trio of autobiographical novels, The Fountain Overflows (1956), This Real Night (1984), and Cousin Rosamund (1985).
When America entered World War II in late 1941, Marshall Best, to a large extent, managed Viking for Harold Guinzburg, who was otherwise engaged. For three years of the war, Guinzburg served in the Office of War Information in Washington, DC, and later in the Office of Strategic Services in England—an impressive piece of public service for someone who was the head of a major publishing house. One magnificent flower that sprang up during these wartime years was The Viking Portable Library, which emerged in response to the need for more compact books due to the limitations of paper quotas during wartime and for reading material for our fighting men and women.
The Viking Portable Library was launched in March 1943 with As You Were, an anthology of fiction, poetry, and nonfiction selected especially for members of the armed forces by the American critic Alexander Woollcott. As the Viking catalog put it, the volume has “humor and excitement, ideas and pure entertainment; the nostalgia of the American scene for those who may be far from home; the magic of good fiction, the charm of poetry, the solid satisfactions of biography and other forms of nonfiction.” The book was meant to be, in Woollcott’s words, “built like a Jeep—compact, efficient, and marvelously versatile,” designed for “the convenience of men who are mostly on the move and must travel light.” At a generous 655 pages, it was reasonably priced at $2.50. Though Woollcott died unexpectedly just a little more than a month before publication, the book was a rousing success, going through multiple printings.
As You Were, along with the success of the Council on Books in Wartime’s Armed Services Editions (which were inexpensive paperback reprints developed specifically for service personnel), gave the publishers at Viking the idea for the Viking Portable line of compact, low‑priced, attractively printed anthologies of the representative writings of a given author or of a given cultural subject. “The basic idea of this series,” according to Viking catalog copy, “is to provide a great deal of material of broad reader interest in the smallest possible space. Presented in ordinary format, these books would be cumbersome library volumes. In this ‘war dress’—a form that is legible, well printed, and strongly bound—they will slip into a man’s pocket.” Viking offered special display racks to booksellers, as well as discounts on multivolume orders to service personnel.
Given the ongoing success of John Steinbeck, it made great commercial sense for the second volume in the series to be an anthology of Steinbeck’s work, and it was put together by Pascal Covici. Viking’s catalog copy for the book, which was published in July 1943, called the volume “everybody’s Steinbeck. For his fans, it brings together the best of his short stories, some of the greatest passages from the novels and nonfiction. For readers coming to Steinbeck afresh, it provides a picture of his development as an artist and a good introduction to the mood and import of all his major works.”
The third volume in the series, The Triumph of Life: Poems of Consolation for the English-Speaking World, edited by the American poet and literary critic Horace Gregory, was released in October 1943, and the fourth, The Viking Portable Library World Bible, edited by Robert O. Ballou, who had joined Viking as an editor in the early 1940s, was published in March 1944. The fifth volume, The Portable Dorothy Parker, came out the following month; as Viking catalog copy put it, “No poet, no storyteller of our time has achieved wider fame, more lasting popularity or universal respect. Here she is, in the palm of your hand, to be read and cherished today, tomorrow, and forevermore.”
The Viking Portable Library was initially looked after by Marshall Best and Pascal Covici. Three further Portable volumes followed in 1944: Six Novels of the Supernatural, The Portable Shakespeare, and Hemingway, edited by the American literary critic, historian, editor, poet, and essayist Malcolm Cowley (1898-1989), who was best known as a chronicler of the so‑called Lost Generation of post-World War I writers. The fourteenth book in the series, The Portable F. Scott Fitzgerald, was edited by none other than Dorothy Parker and introduced by John O’Hara. Viking continued its publishing of Portables well into the late twentieth century, and they are still actively published as paperbacks by Penguin Classics; most recently, The Portable Feminist Reader, edited by Roxane Gay, hit the paperback bestseller list when it was published in March 2025.