The Review mourns the passing of Morton M. Martin, who died of natural causes in his home in San Raphael, CA on July 10. He was 106 years old.
During an era of star writers and famous editors, Martin was an anomaly—a star provider (and, more importantly, improver) of titles. He was sixteen, a junior editor at Scribner’s, when Ernest Hemingway’s novel of “the Lost Generation” arrived under the title of The Sun Comes Up, Too. When its editor, Maxwell Perkins, overheard Martin commenting in the company lunchroom, “I’m just a kid, but golly, it sure seems to me that The Sun Also Rises would be a better title,” he conveyed the idea to Hemingway, who reluctantly agreed.
From that day on, Martin’s reputation as “a title man” began an unstoppable ascent. He resigned his post at Scribner’s and offered his services free-lance to a wide range of clients. It was he who turned William Faulkner’s A Lot of Noise and People Being Angry into The Sound and the Fury (1929). In 1931, asked personally by Pearl Buck what he thought of her title, The Not-Bad Earth, he pondered for three days before deciding on The Good Earth.
One of Martin’s primary strengths was to reduce an overwrought title to its essence. Thus, Henry Roth’s laborious original title, What’s The Name of That State of Suspended Consciousness and Bodily Rest? became Call it Sleep (1934). Margaret Mitchell sent him flowers and a bottle of champagne when, in 1936, he turned her Blown Away by Breezes and Other Atmospheric Movements of Air into Gone With the Wind.
However, he could also retain an original’s succinctness and punch while still delivering a clear improvement. When Raymond Chandler sent Martin a postcard with the terse, “M—How about A Large Nap?” the author received a reply in kind: “Ray—Nix. The Big Sleep,” (1939). Norman Mailer’s The Unclothed and the Deceased became The Naked and the Dead (1948). And everyone knows how, in 1951, Martin re-titled J.D. Salinger’s The Shortstop in the Bourbon.
As in every career, there were misses as well as hits. Ralph Ellison politely but firmly rejected Martin’s A Guy Nobody Can See and retained his original title of Invisible Man (1952). Philip Roth thought See You Later, Magellan a “piss-poor substitute” for Goodbye, Columbus (1959). And Ken Kesey called Martin “an asshole” for changing One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest to Freebird (1962).
Still, his reputation hardly suffered. By then he had acquired, not only a universally-acknowledged nickname (“The Titleist”), but a golf ball had been named in his honor. He won a Pulitzer Prize for Naming when, in 1971, he turned All the Stories Flannery O’Connor Ever Wrote, Or at Least Published into The Complete Stories of Flannery O’Connor. Though he announced his retirement in 1988, he was persuaded by Tim O’Brien’s publisher, Houghton Mifflin, to turn his attention to the author’s Viet Nam war classic, The Stuff They Schlepped. In 1990 Martin turned it into The Things They Carried, and it became a modern classic.
Martin was married, for 45 years, to Margaret Miller, who died in 2003. He is survived by his children, Theodicy, Banana-Cream, and Adverb, as well as seven grandchildren.
