Podcast. Listen to the organist, the culturally omnivorous, intellectually ravenous podcast from the editors of the Believer magazine.

Part of poetry is learning how to speak. Chili Billy. I am also a horse. I really value my life,

even though I know it's debatable whether I'm even really alive.

The right reading for this is the one I'm giving it.

Find the organist on KCRW.com or wherever you download podcasts.

Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannon Foundation.

Boots.

Where would we be without boos?

Where would we be without good?

No to turn.

It's a rhetorical question, sir.

But where would we be without books?

From KCRW and KCRW.com, I'm Michael Silverblatt, and welcome to Bookworm.

Today I have a very special show, the biographer A. Scottberg, who's written many, highly regarded and well-awarded biographies of Lindbergh of Samuel Goldwyn wrote when he was in his 20s a biography of the editor, Max Perkins.

The book is called Max Perkins, editor of genius. It won that year's

1978 National Book Award. Now there's a film called Genius. It's based on the relationship

between Maxwell Perkins and Thomas Wolfe.

Thomas Wolfe, the author of Look Homeward Angel, of Time in the River, You Can't

Go Home Again.

But Perkins was also the editor and discoverer of F. Scott Fitzgerald, of Hemingway. He edited the year

which won the Pulitzer Prize that year. He was really publishers great bad boy, bringing

in books that publishers didn't want, were afraid of.

...