Gore Vidal: Luckily, No One Knows How To Edit Anymore
You've gotta love cranky literary gay Gore Vidal. Even though he is 80,000 years old, he isn't afraid to stir up some shit, courageously calling out people who have been dead for way too long to talk back, and celebrating the fact that (he thinks) editors don't edit anymore because editing makes writers — that hack Fitzgerald, for example — worse:
Along came in the '20s a bunch of near-illiterates, like F. Scott Fitzgerald, who couldn't spell. Max Perkins, his hack editor at Scribner, would help him turn his prose into recognizable English. Somehow in the world of hackdom it's got out that every writer needs a stern person as teacher behind him, who will tell him 'i before e except after c.' I've never known a good writer who needed an editor. Many of them have been destroyed by good editors. Luckily, no one knows how to edit anymore either, so I think that phase is over.
On second thought, maybe you don't have to love him. We sure don't.
