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Manager as Muse: Maxwell Perkins’ Work with
F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and Thomas Wolfe
by Dr. Kathleen Dixon Donnelly, released on 2nd February, 2015,
providing guidelines for those who manage creative people
Birmingham, UK, [26 January, 2015]–Manager as Muse: Maxwell Perkins’ Work with F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and Thomas Wolfe by Dr. Kathleen Dixon Donnelly, to be released on the 2nd of February by K. Donnelly Communications, on Amazon.co.uk in both print and Kindle formats, provides guidelines for managers in the creative industries.
Manager as Muse focuses on the relationships between legendary Scribner’s editor Maxwell Perkins and his three most famous authors, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Wolfe, resulting in guidelines for anyone tasked with managing creative people.
‘I had always been fascinated by the legend of Perkins,’ Dr. Donnelly explains, ‘and when I was studying for my MBA at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, PA, back in the 1980s, I knew I wanted to learn more about how creativity and creative people operate in business. My thesis was a good opportunity to look in detail at someone who was obviously a master at motivating and guiding these incredible writers.’
This version of the book has been substantially edited from Dr. Donnelly’s original thesis. ‘I felt it would be best to keep the emphasis on the relationships between Perkins and these three interesting men. But the conclusion is the same—guidelines to help anyone who has to manage or supervise creative people. How did Perkins keep these guys writing? How much did he push? How much did he stay hands off?’
The 1980s biography, Max Perkins: Editor of Genius, by Pulitzer-prize winning author A. Scott Berg, gave Dr. Donnelly a basis to build on. ‘But I drew on many other sources about editors, publishing, creative people. Quite a bit came from collections of letters between the editor and his authors. People wrote letters in those days! They provide a wealth of information,’ she says.
Berg’s book is currently being made into a film, Genius, starring Colin Firth as Perkins, Jude Law as Wolfe, and Nicole Kidman as Wolfe’s mistress, Aline Bernstein. The film is shooting now in the UK and is scheduled to be released in 2016.
Dr. Donnelly, a senior lecturer in both the Business School and the School of Media at Birmingham [UK] City University, has given presentations on Perkins and his authors as part of her ‘Such Friends’ series about writers in the early part of the 20th century.
‘After researching Perkins and that time period, when it came time to do my Ph.D. in Communications, at Dublin City University, I decided to build on the information I had and look into writers who socialized together, as Fitzgerald and Hemingway did in Paris in the 1920s with Gertrude Stein and others.
‘This led me to other groups of creative people of the time: William Butler Yeats and the Irish Literary Renaissance who founded the Abbey theatre, Virginia Woolf and her Bloomsbury group of painters and writers, and Dorothy Parker and the Algonquin Round Table who wrote for The New Yorker when they weren’t lunching at the hotel. My work with these groups is called ‘Such Friends,’ taken from Yeats’ line, ‘and say my glory was I had such friends.’
Manager as Muse is available from Amazon.co.uk for £10.04 for the paperback and £3.77 for the Kindle version. The original thesis is available at www.lulu.com/spotlight/suchfriends. More information about the groups of writers, and Dr. Donnelly’s presentations, is available at www.suchfriends.wordpress.com and @SuchFriends
K. Donnelly Communications, [www.kdonnellycommunications.wordpress.com] a marketing consultancy agency, was formed in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in 1979 to provide marketing and public relations services to small businesses and non-profit organizations.
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SuchFriends Blog 