In Memory of William Faulkner This Business Will Be Closed From 2:00 to 2:15 P.M. Today

LARB presents an excerpt from Gayle Feldman’s forthcoming biography of Bennett Cerf, the legendary American publisher.

By Gayle FeldmanJanuary 9, 2026

• Biography & Autobiography

WHEN THE THREE TRAVELERS—Bennett Cerf, his best friend and Random House co-founder Donald Klopfer, and their author William Styron—reached Oxford, Mississippi, an odd feeling settled deep in them as they circled the town center. Peering through the car windows, everything was foreign and at the same time familiar: the white-columned courthouse on the little square; slit-mouthed white farmers in sun-bleached overalls, their wrinkles like dusty bird-tracks etched into aging skin; red-faced young fellows, short-sleeved and crew-cut, clustered around the perimeter; quiet Black men under the trees, selling fruit they’d picked that morning. Bennett had seen this place in the film of Intruder in the Dust. All three knew it in their mind’s eye as “Jefferson,” in Faulkner’s novels.

Mrs. Nina Goolsby, editor and co-owner of The Oxford Eagle, was one of the newspaper people who’d been in touch the previous night. She said she had things to show Bennett and the others, and would be glad to take them for a tour of the town. They parked the Chevy and emerged from its cool cocoon, having paid extra for the luxury of air-conditioning. Outside, the heavy wet wallop of heat was stunning. They had anticipated the assault, but its intensity was overwhelming. The first fellow they asked to direct them to the Eagle stared. A second didn’t answer either. A third finally said, “I think it’s over there.” Bennett was sure all three knew its whereabouts, but their enmity to these Northern interlopers was as palpable as the heat.

Fat, bustling Mrs. Goolsby, friendly under a buzzing air-conditioner, had assembled a mess of back issues with articles by and about Faulkner. She wanted to prove that, whatever outsiders might think about the townspeople not caring for their local son, they did. Bennett remained far from convinced, but that she did care was unequivocal. Mrs. Goolsby had just returned from distributing handbills printed at her own expense—“In Memory of William Faulkner This Business Will Be Closed From 2:00 to 2:15 PM Today, July 7, 1962”—mounting a one-woman campaign to persuade store owners to place them in their windows and follow suit.

At half past 11, the three men drove to Rowan Oak. As they walked down an arcade of tall canopied cedars toward the columned portico precisely centered at its end, they almost did a double take: the man at the entrance could have been Bill. Up close, John Faulkner, one of his brothers, was thinner, his thatch a little whiter. Already he was a bit drunk and passing judgment on all who would enter. The whole extended clan had gathered. Bennett mused how most had never understood their famous relation; many didn’t even like him. (The feeling was mutual.) Yet down the years, Bill had come through for them, and not a few had filled their bellies off his work. John Faulkner had been expecting his brother’s publishers, but not any man from Life. He didn’t want Styron snooping around, even if he was, as Bennett tried to persuade him, an admirer and fellow writer who’d do the great man justice. It was an uncomfortable replay of how Faulkner himself had fought off reporters whom Bennett had wanted him to meet.

Styron stayed outside. Inside, fans whirred, making it a degree or so cooler, but for two Yankees in suits, it was like wading through half-formed Jell-O. They paused for a moment at the parlor, where the body lay in a closed coffin perfectly devoid of flowers, then passed through the dining room, where a vast spread of offerings brought by relations—turkeys and hams, pies and puddings (as well as sweating pitchers of iced tea with which to down them)—awaited lunchtime. They were shepherded upstairs to “Miss Estelle’s” bedroom, where Jill joined them.

With help from AA, Estelle had stopped drinking a half dozen years before. Bennett saw her staring into space and suspected she’d taken something to calm her nerves. Don, looking at the same picture, saw a woman “composed and sensible” under the circumstances. She was vain, had been flirtatious in youth, and like Faulkner, coveted good clothes. All her life gardenia-pale, stick-thin, and cinched Scarlett O’Hara–tight, for this last public appearance she’d dressed the part. The twisting black edges of an oversized ruffle cascaded like tributaries down the front of her beige belted dress. A broad-brimmed black hat and elbow-length gloves rested nearby.

Don began to talk quietly about Bill. Estelle responded warmly. It wasn’t simply the rules of decorum: a few years earlier, she’d been a guest at his farm, and as a younger woman who could be charming and open to being charmed, she’d enjoyed Bennett’s company on rare visits to New York. Theirs was more than a quarter century of acquaintance. Donald later ventured that Faulkner’s widow and daughter were genuinely glad to see them, even if the rest of the clan looked on with barely concealed hostility. Without question, Estelle and Jill thought him a true gentleman—a designation of particular significance within the code of the South. They were partial to his lady, “Miss Pat,” as well. Thus, on his own account, he was right.

Yet Jill’s feelings about Bennett were more ambivalent. Her father’s daughter, she wasn’t given to many words and had never felt quite comfortable when Bennett waltzed her into “21” or treated her to an evening at the theater. At times she tried to duck the boisterous voice intent on entertaining her, which seemed oblivious to her shy unease. Jill liked “Miss Phyllis” well enough, though, joining her conspiratorially in laughing at her spouse’s undignified foolery behind his back. Bennett compounded Jill’s discomfort by “showing her off ” as she saw it, happily and pointedly introducing her as “William Faulkner’s daughter,” the same way he referenced his wife as “Ginger Rogers’ cousin.” The name-dropping was enough to make her squirm. Like Phyllis, Jill reaped the benefits of proximity to fame, but in her case had suffered its cost from earliest childhood. Once, when she was pleading with her father to stop drinking, Faulkner had lashed out: “Nobody remembers Shakespeare’s children.” The memory of that never left her. She was proud to be her father’s daughter, but struggled to be her own woman.

The way she felt about Bennett’s displaying her like a badge of distinction wasn’t unlike how Faulkner felt about Truman Capote trying to cozy up to him at Random House. When Jill visited New York with “Pappy,” he’d send her into the palazzo, as scout and decoy, to avoid an encounter with Bennett’s pet author. He desired no clinging attachment from a “fan boy.”

After a half hour with the two women, Donald and Bennett went downstairs, to the busy crowd tucking in to the sumptuous spread like a wake of hungry vultures. Were Bill Faulkner not dead in his box, he would have looked on, amused: six years earlier, he’d told Jean Stein that, if reincarnated, he wanted to come back as a buzzard.

A woman sidled up while Bennett and Don were milling around Faulkner’s buzzard-filled parlor, and asked if he wasn’t “the fellow we see on Sunday night on What’s My Line?” With his acknowledgment that yes, he was one and the same, the enmity he and Don had experienced from the room evaporated. To her, he became “one of the people who came to [her] house every week … an old friend.”

Later, when the extended kin and very few outsiders—Bennett; Donald; Faulkner’s friend Shelby Foote (deep into writing his Civil War history for Random House); Linton Massey, a devoted scholar and collector of all things Faulkner; and a couple of others—gathered in the parlor with the immediate family, Estelle recalled that Bennett had told her about Styron. She beckoned him, one more outsider, in. They listened as an Episcopalian minister slowly intoned a 10-minute service over the coffin: a few Bible selections, the Lord’s Prayer, no eulogy, as simple as Bill would have wanted. Afterward, they got into the Chevy, part of a crocodile of cars behind the black-finned Cadillac hearse heading toward the square and then the cemetery.

Bennett looked at the battered old cars and could only sniff and shake his head at such a clapped-out cortege. Yet peering again from inside the blessed air-conditioning, he found himself jolted anew, the big city slicker brought short by a sudden transformation in the queer hick town. It was as though a spell had been cast: nothing moved, every shop was closed, and the residents stood—about a third of the folks were Black—in the square or on balconies, silent, watching, erect, respectful. Police covered their hearts with their caps. All motion and sound ceased, except for the snap-and-flash of photographers’ cameras and scratching of pens on reporters’ pads; waiting on a knoll above the gravesite, they had converged from all over, ants to a picnic.

Funerals “are a big thing around here,” one laconic onlooker told Styron.

Bennett and Donald were more charitable. To Bennett’s way of thinking, the town realized that “they had lost an important citizen. They hadn’t read him. They didn’t understand him. [Many] didn’t pay much attention to him when alive.” Some, Don thought, “hated” him; some “loved” him; many “couldn’t quite cotton up to the fact that a man could scribble words on paper and make a decent living.” But the people knew what they had to do now—just as Bennett and Donald had known—and they did it.

The mourners got to the cemetery. A tent had been erected on the side of a small hill, and under it a dozen or so chairs were placed for the closest family alongside the newly dug grave. The rest—still not a great crowd—stood as the minister reprised the same service he’d conducted at the house. The three men did not tarry. Styron had a deadline to write it up for Life, and Donald wanted to return to New York if at all possible that night, however late. They said their goodbyes and made for Memphis.

A few days later, Bennett wrote to Shelby Foote. Curiosity had got the better of him: he wanted to know what transpired after they left. He hated not being in on action through to the end; it was like reading a story and stopping before the last chapter. He also expressed gratitude for the only consolation out of Oxford that day: Foote had reported good progress on his work.

“I think it will be one of the items on the Random House list of which I’ll be most proud for the rest of my life,” Bennett told him. There’d be no more pride in new works from Bill.

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The role of the publisher does not end with an author’s death. Originally, Bill had done his former editor Saxe Commins the honor of naming him literary executor. Had that plan not been waylaid by Saxe’s demise, Random House would have exercised an extraordinary influence over Faulkner’s literary afterlife. Instead, the task and privilege of ultimate control devolved to Jill. Still, there was much that Random House, from apex to base, had to do. The job before them was “to make public” Faulkner’s work in the widest sense. Not to take advantage of the coverage of his passing would have been to neglect that role. They’d continue to push hard for sales of his last novel, The Reivers, published only the previous month. Donald had predicted—correctly—that it would reach the bestseller list. But that was only one prong in the posthumous promotion plan.

A week after the death, Richard Krinsley, who’d become sales manager, sent a memo to the salesmen: to capitalize on the interest in Faulkner, an announcement would go out to their very best accounts—about 200 stores—offering a special promotion and physical display unit stocked with all of his works in print. Every­thing about the unit would be “very handsome … and infinitely more dignified and proper than anything we have ever done in this area.” It was a distinct contrast to the way the firm had treated Bill for the first dozen or so years of their acquaintance. In those days, paltry sales hadn’t justified keeping his backlist in print, so those titles had languished in limbo, cutting off any possibility of his earning money from them at a time when he was desperate for cash. Donald had come to feel “ashamed” about those decisions. Public taste is fickle, but perhaps some way could have been found to beat the drum and bring at least a modicum of his work back to life—what Malcolm Cowley accomplished under Viking’s aegis with The Portable Faulkner in 1946—but they were plenty busy, and their resources limited. Now at least they’d make sure his books were available.

Yet publishing Faulkner had been a complicated business from the start, and if Donald was hard on himself because financials in the 1930s and ’40s had trumped the responsibility to “make public,” other obligations had been undertaken by Random House in exemplary fashion. One had to do with his reputation, not just as a writer, but also as a man. When the New York Times reporter telephoned him on the morning of the death, Bennett chose his words carefully: of course, Faulkner’s “literary impact” was “simply enormous,” bringing him respect from “every type of author. Every other author in America looks upon [him] as one of our all-time greats.” From the publisher’s vantage point, he “was just about the ideal author,” giving over his manuscript to Random House and trusting them to do the right thing, never interfering or complaining. But beyond that—“besides being one of the greatest authors of our times”—Faulkner, Bennett stressed, was “about as fine a gentleman as I have ever met.” He attested that he’d never seen him “do anything that wasn’t gallant, fine and the mark of a perfect gentleman.”

Yet he, Don, Bob, and Saxe had during a quarter century seen plenty of behaviors that didn’t fit into that description. They’d played a part in situations so far removed from business as usual, even publishing-business as usual, as to be almost inconceivable to outsiders. Whether it was arranging rescue from binges, exercising discretion over mistresses, purchasing pipes, clothes, etc.—even, on his instructions, denying Estelle the money she moaned for—they did what he asked, or what he needed them to do without even asking. The four suits in Saxe’s office awaiting Bill’s visits were the tiniest token of how much a part of Random House he’d become.

To be sure, gossip about the drinking had gotten about—on one of his cultural goodwill missions for the US government in the post-Nobel years, Faulkner had been photographed getting off a plane abroad, drunk and disheveled. Occasional inebriated and inflammatory assertions were of his own (un)doing. Yet for Bennett and Don, each deeply in love with words and books and publishing, what Faulkner had done with his pen rose high above anything self-destructive, pathetic, mean, or foolish that they’d witnessed, and that was what they were determined to project. Like his partner, Donald attested to an interviewer that Faulkner was “one of the greatest gentlemen that I’ve ever met.” Oh yes, he was also “strange” and “involuted,” but at the same time, Donald underlined, “a great, great human being.”

If Mark Twain was arguably the foremost American prose writer of the 19th century, the one novelist who, in Huckleberry Finn, had dared to take on the forbidden subject of whites and Blacks that had torn the nation asunder—the subject that had to be addressed honestly if the country were ever to heal—Faulkner was Twain’s 20th-century white counterpart. In an entirely different but equally brilliant fashion, he’d taken up a similar challenge, and created a vast opus. That was the man Bennett and Don wanted the world to know they’d published, the man they wanted remembered—alongside a row of books that would, they felt sure, long endure.

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Excerpted from Nothing Random: Bennett Cerf and the Publishing House He Built, by Gayle Feldman, to be published by Random House, a division of Penguin Random House. Copyright © 2026 by Gayle Feldman. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved.