She died when Bennett was 15; shortly afterward, her brother Herbert moved into the Cerf household and became a strong literary and social influence on the teenager.

[5] He spent his teenage years at 790 Riverside Drive, an apartment building in Washington Heights, which was home to two of his friends who became prominent as adults: Howard Dietz and Hearst newspapers financial editor Merryle Rukeyser.

After graduating from Columbia University, Cerf worked briefly as a reporter for the New York Herald Tribune and for some time in a Wall Street brokerage.

The publishing company used as its logo a little house drawn by Cerf's friend and fellow Columbia alumnus Rockwell Kent.

[6] Cerf's talent in building and maintaining relationships brought contracts with such writers as William Faulkner, John O'Hara, Eugene O'Neill, James Michener, Truman Capote, Theodor Seuss Geisel, and others.

One chapter from its previous serialization in Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap's Chicago-based literary magazine, The Little Review, had led to its being found "a work of obscenity".)

The publisher, therefore, made an arrangement to import the book and to have a copy seized by the United States Customs Service when it arrived.

In 1959, Maco Magazine Corporation published what became known as "The Cream of the Master's Crop", a compilation of Cerf's jokes, gags, stories, puns, and wit.

Before 1951, Cerf was an occasional panelist on the NBC game show Who Said That?, on which celebrities tried to identify the speakers of quotations taken from recent news reports.

Until his death, Cerf continued to appear regularly on the CBS Films (now Viacom) syndicated version of What's My Line?, along with Arlene Francis.

In the early 1950s, while maintaining a Manhattan residence, Bennett and Phyllis Cerf bought an estate at Mount Kisco, New York, which became his country home for the rest of his life.