Rosemary Goring, literary editor for The Herald (Scotland), considered the writer-editor relationship in an essay, “Is writing on the wall for editors?”

“Great editors helped make the name of their writers,” she wrote. “Perhaps the most famous, Max Perkins, was Hemingway’s literary right hand, and that of F. Scott Fitzgerald too. Raymond Carver might never have reached the limelight but for the unsentimental and vigorous reshaping his editor Gordon Lish demanded. And those who wrote for the New Yorker will never forget the firm but courteous intervention of an editor such as William Maxwell, himself a fine novelist, who saved many authors from embarrassing themselves with a glitch or a cliche or a tired sentence. One of the New Yorker‘s regular contributors, John Updike, was rare in admitting he was always delighted to be edited. If someone wanted to suggest improvements, he was more than happy to consider them.”