After editing The Columbia Review, staging plays at Cambridge, and a stint in the greeting-card department of Macy's, Robert Gottlieb stumbled into a job at Simon and Schuster. By the time he left to run Alfred A. Knopf a dozen years later, he was the editor in chief, having discovered and edited Catch-22 and The American Way of Death, among other bestsellers. At Knopf, Gottlieb edited a long list of authors, including Toni Morrison, John Cheever, Doris Lessing, John le Carré, Michael Crichton, Lauren Bacall, Katharine Graham, Robert Caro, Nora Ephron, and Bill Clinton -- not to mention Bruno Bettelheim and Miss Piggy. In Avid Reader, Gottlieb writes about succeeding William Shawn as the editor of The New Yorker, and the challenges and satisfactions of running America's preeminent magazine. Sixty years after joining Simon and Schuster, Gottlieb is still at it -- editing, anthologizing, and, to his surprise, writing.

This is the story of how the Big Apple emerged as the cultural capital of the postwar world in all fields of creative endeavour art, architecture, design, music, theatre and dance. It was a period of intense cross-fertilization, as poets and critics mixed with artists, dealers, musicians, designers, architects, dancers, and choreographers. Richly illustrated with hundreds of paintings, drawings, photographs, elevations, plans, posters, programmes and ephemera, this is a stirring evocation of a remarkably fertile period in the city's history, the styles and aesthetics of which are now very much back in vogue