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.”