The Editor Who Edited Salinger

“Nobody in my family dates letters,” the narrator of “Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters” says, and the same may be said of its author, J. D. Salinger, and of many other writers and editors whose letters form part of the Lobrano Collection, recently acquired by the Morgan Library. Gustave S. Lobrano, known as Gus, was a fiction editor at The New Yorker from 1937 to 1956. He edited Salinger, Thurber, Perelman, Cheever, O’Hara, and many others. His papers were safeguarded by his daughter, Dorothy (Dotty) Lobrano Guth, who also worked at the magazine. (Full disclosure: we were colleagues on the copydesk in the eighties.) She handed them down to her daughter, Dorothy Jean (Jeanie) Guth, who placed them at the Morgan. They are currently in the care of Philip Palmer, the head of the Morgan’s department of literary and historical manuscripts.