Robert Gottlieb, famed editor who championed Joseph Heller and Chaim Potok, dies at 92

Robert Gottlieb, the legendary literary editor who shepherded into print and best-sellerdom such 20th-century classics as Joseph Heller’s “Catch-22,” Robert Caro’s “The Power Broker” and Chaim Potok’s “The Chosen,” dies at age 92.

Gottlieb died yesterday of natural causes at a New York hospital, Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group announces. Caro, who had worked for decades with Gottlieb on his Lyndon Johnson biographies and was featured with him last year in the documentary “Turn Every Page,” says in a statement that he had never worked with an editor so attuned to the writing process.

“From the day 52 years ago that we first looked at my pages together, Bob understood what I was trying to do and made it possible for me to take the time, and do the work, I needed to do,” Caro says in a statement. “People talk to me about some of the triumphant moments Bob and I shared, but today I remember other moments, tough ones, and I remember how Bob was always, always, for half a century, there for me. He was a great friend, and today I mourn my friend with all my heart.”

Few editors of his generation had as big an impact on the literary culture, from his time as editor-in-chief of Simon & Schuster to his later association with Alfred A. Knopf (now Knopf Doubleday). He edited The New Yorker for five years and wrote numerous books himself, including several on one of his many passions: ballet.