William Maxwell Evarts "Max" Perkins (September 20, 1884 – June 17, 1947) was an American book editor, best remembered for discovering authors Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, and Thomas Wolfe.

After working as a reporter for The New York Times, Perkins joined the publishing house of Charles Scribner's Sons in 1910 as an advertising manager, before becoming an editor.

Unlike most editors, he actively sought out promising new authors; he made his first big find in 1919 when he signed F. Scott Fitzgerald.

The commercial success of Hemingway's next novel, A Farewell to Arms (1929), which topped the best-seller list, silenced colleagues' questions about Perkins' editorial judgment.

His next, Of Time and the River (1935), was the result of a two-year battle during which Wolfe kept writing more and more pages in the face of an ultimately victorious effort by Perkins to hold the line on size.

His advice was responsible for the success of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, whose The Yearling (1938) grew out of suggestions made by Perkins.

[4] Perkins' final discovery was Marguerite Young, who started her mammoth Miss MacIntosh, My Darling in 1947 with his encouragement, signing a contract in 1947 based on her 40-page manuscript.

Apart from his roles as coach, friend, and promoter, Perkins was unusual among editors for the close and detailed attention he gave to books, and for what the novelist Vance Bourjaily, another of his discoveries, called his "infallible sense of structure."

His granddaughter Jenny King Phillips, a documentary filmmaker and therapist, helped spearhead the restoration of Ernest Hemingway’s home in Cuba.

King, is a former editor of The Philadelphia Inquirer, president of The Heinz Endowments, chief executive officer of the Fred Rogers Center for Early Learning and Children's Media at St. Vincent's College, president and CEO of The Pittsburgh Foundation, and the author of The Good Neighbor: The Life and Work of Fred Rogers, an authorized biography of the beloved children's television host.

[8] In the 1983 film Cross Creek, exploring his professional relationship with Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, Perkins is portrayed by actor Malcolm McDowell.