This is Fresh Air. I'm Dave Davies. Today we remember Robert Gottlieb, perhaps the most acclaimed editor of his time. He died last week at the age of 92. His first real job was at the publishing house Simon & Schuster in 1955. From there he became the editor-in-chief of the literary publishing house Alfred A. Kanoff.

Gottlieb edited scores of books including fiction, history, biography, and memoir by such authors as Joseph Heller, Doris Lessing, Tony Morrison, John Chiever, John Lee Carey, Catherine Graham, Bill Clinton, Nora Efron, and Michael Criteen.

He left Kanoff to become the editor of the New Yorker in 1987, taking over from William Shaw.

One of the remarkable parts of his career is his more than 50 years as Robert Carrows editor.

Carrow wrote the Pulitzer Prize-winning bestseller The Power Broker, an exhaustive investigation into how Robert Moses reshaped New York City and how he used and abused power.

The use and abuse of power is also at the heart of Carrows' biographies of Lyndon Johnson.

Carrow is still writing the fifth and final volume, and Gottlieb was waiting to edit it.

Terry Gross spoke to Robert Gottlieb about his life and his often contentious collaboration with Carrow last December when their relationship was portrayed in a documentary called Turn Every Page, directed by his daughter Lizzie Gottlieb.

Robert Gottlieb, welcome to Fresh Air.

Thank you.

So Robert Carrows' books are about the use and abuse of political power, how powerful people affect the lives of other people for better or worse.

What was the power dynamic like in your relationship since he writes so much about power? What is that power dynamic like?

Well, I don't really believe there is a power dynamic between an author and an editor when the relationship is haltson.

Both have to be strong, have strong opinions and feel free and safe in expressing them in as polite a way as possible.

We had disagreements along the way, certainly, and we could both get excited about them or buy them.

But on the whole for 50 years of work, it's been productive to my mind pleasant, except when it wasn't.

And it's gotten better and better, and in fact our relationship has gotten better and better through the years.

So I could say today, which I could not have said 50 years ago, that we are friends.

You say that you knew after 15 pages that this book was a masterpiece. How did you know the book is over a thousand pages?

Well, that's what makes you an editor, a good one. You respond to what you're reading.

If you're stunned by it, excited by it, amused by it, thrilled by it, then you assume that you're not alone, that if you like it, I always would like it.

You know, I mean, the editor is a reader who edits.

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