ABSTRACT
Bennett Cerf was perhaps America's best-known publisher-humorist during the middle part of the twentieth century. Cerf was the son of Gustave and Fredricka Cerf, and was born in New York City on May 25, 1898. Cerf was vice-president of the company when he left it in 1925, buying out Liveright's shares in the Modern Library. Cerf was an activist publisher. In the early 1930s, when James Joyce's Ulysses was banned in the United States, Cerf had a copy smuggled into the country. Cerf was a showman, so it was natural that he would become a regular on a television show. Briefly married to actress Sylvia Sydney, Cerf later married Phyllis Frazier in 1940, in a ceremony performed by New York Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia. Bennett Cerf was a major figure in American publishing, and a skilled humorist in his own right. Cerf collected and dispensed anecdotes, puns, and riddles for an audience evenly divided between adults and children.
