Nothing Random

Bennett Cerf and the Publishing House He Built

By: Gayle Feldman

The story of the legendary Random House founder, whose seemingly charmed life at the apogee of the American Century featured a front-row seat on history, an epic cast, and left an enduring cultural legacy

At midcentury, everyone knew Bennett Cerf: witty, beloved, middle-aged panelist on What’s My Line?, whom TV brought into America’s homes each week. They didn’t know the handsome, driven, paradoxical young man of the 1920s who’d vowed to become a great publisher, and a decade later, was. By then, he’d signed Eugene O’Neill, Gertrude Stein, William Faulkner, and had fought the landmark censorship case that gave Americans the freedom to read James Joyce’s Ulysses.

With his best friend and lifelong business partner Donald Klopfer, and other young Jewish entrepreneurs like the Knopfs and Simon & Schuster, Cerf remade the book business: what was published, and how. In 1925, he and Klopfer had bought the Modern Library and turned it into an institution, then founded Random House, which eventually became a home to Truman Capote, Ralph Ellison, Ayn Rand, Dr. Seuss, Toni Morrison, James Michener, and many more.

Even before TV, Cerf was a bestselling author and columnist as well as publisher; the show super-charged his celebrity, bringing fame – but also criticism. A brilliant social networker and major influencer before such terms existed, he connected books-Broadway-TV-Hollywood-politics. A fervent democratizer, he published “high,” “low,” and wide, and from the roaring twenties to the swinging sixties collected an incredible array of friends, from George Gershwin to Frank Sinatra, having a fabulous time along the way.

Using interviews with more than 200 individuals; deeply researched archival material; and letters from private collections not previously available, this book recalls Bennett Cerf to vibrant life, bringing booklovers into his world and time, finally giving a true American original his due.

©2025 Gayle Feldman (P)2025 Random House Audio

Critic reviews

“An engrossing and intimate story of Bennett Cerf’s incredible publishing journey through the American Century . . . Gayle Feldman has crafted a sweeping intellectual history with a stunning cast of characters. . . . A scintillating biography that reveals the inner struggles of a great publishing house. Feldman’s is a stunning achievement.”—Kai Bird, Pulitzer Prize–winning co-author of American Prometheus

“Gayle Feldman knows publishing, so Nothing Random is a seriously knowing look at the business from the scrappy Roaring Twenties to the corporate seventies (and after), but told with the same high spirits as the irrepressible Bennett Cerf at the heart of most of it, mixing business with fun. Everybody’s here, from Gertrude Stein to Frank Sinatra. Authoritative, affectionate, and always entertaining, Nothing Random is like being a guest at one of Cerf’s legendary dinner parties, where authors met Broadway composers, TV celebrities, and maybe a starlet or two who’d just breezed in from the Coast, and no one went home early.”—Joseph Kanon, former book editor and New York Times bestselling author of Shanghai

“Bennett Cerf lived a larger-than-life life, and Gayle Feldman has given us the biography the great publisher deserves—a Lucullan feast of a book, filled with boldfaced names, meticulously researched and elegantly written, and for all its appropriate heft, something Cerf himself would have appreciated: a page-turner.”—James Kaplan, New York Times bestselling author of 3 Shades of Blue