The Time of Their Lives: The Golden Age of Great American Book Publishers, Their Editors, and Authors
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The Time of Their Lives: The Golden Age of Great American Book Publishers, Their Editors, and Authors
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Overview
According to Al Silverman, former publisher of Viking Press and president of the Book-of-the-Month Club, the golden age of book publishing began after World War II and lasted into the early 1980s.
In this entertaining and affectionate industry biography, Silverman captures the passionate spirit of legendary houses such as Knopf; Farrar, Straus and Giroux; Grove Press; and Harper & Row, and profiles larger-than-life executives and editors, including Alfred and Blanche Knopf, Bennett Cerf, Roger Straus, Seymour Lawrence, and Cass Canfield. More than one hundred and twenty publishing insiders share their behind-the-scenes stories about how some of the most famous books in American literary history—from The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich to The Silence of the Lambs—came into being and why they’re still being read today.
A joyful tribute to the hard work and boundless energy of professionals who dedicate their careers to getting great books in front of enthusiastic readers, The Time of Their Lives will delight bibliophiles and anyone interested in this important and ever-evolving industry.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781504028257 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Open Road Media |
| Publication date: | 01/19/2016 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 512 |
| Sales rank: | 812,390 |
| File size: | 4 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
The Time of Their Lives
The Golden Age of Great American Book Publishers, Their Editors, and Authors
By Al Silverman
OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA
Copyright © 2008 Al SilvermanAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-5040-2825-7
CHAPTER 1
YOU ARE WHAT YOU PUBLISH
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
The first list of a new publishing house is always an adventure. A new imprint on a book gathers character through the years, and it is our hope that readers will come to know ours and, perhaps, to feel a certain friendship for it. — JOHN FARRAR AND ROGER W. STRAUS, JR., 1946
On the Monday morning of December 8, 2003, after New York City had been hit by its biggest December snowstorm ever, I headed downtown to see Roger Straus. I wanted him to recall for me a life well spent as the founder of postwar America's most distinguished new American publishing house — seventeen Nobel Prizes in literature, twelve of them since 1970. Alfred A. Knopf's venerable house, considered the most literary of them all, had twelve Nobels between 1916 and 1964. But Farrar, Straus and Giroux set the postwar standard for literary excellence in the glory years of book publishing.
I wondered if Roger would show up for our meeting. He was nearly eighty-seven years old, with serious health problems, and he had just come out of the hospital after two weeks of fighting pneumonia. When I called his office I was happy to hear that he was back and would see me.
Roger and I had done good deeds together during my years at the Book-of-the-Month Club; so many of the books he published had become our books. We also bumped into each other now and then after a late afternoon weekend movie at our Westchester County cinema paradiso. On those impromptu occasions Roger was entirely without portfolio; he wore scruffy suburban work clothes, and talked with unbecoming shyness in the presence of our wives.
I was coming to Farrar, Straus and Giroux to converse with Roger, as I had explained to him earlier over the phone, about the book I was writing, on what I perceived to be the golden age of publishing. "It began," I said, "in 1946, when you gave birth." I told him that Farrar, Straus would probably be my first chapter. I think he liked the idea of marching ahead in the field, and so here he was, greeting me at the door of his corner office overlooking a rare setting outside — a marshmallow blanket of snow blinking in the sun atop all of Union Square.
I was not surprised to see a thinner, worn-looking Roger. His face carried a post-hospital pallor and his eyes were puffy. But he was still his dapper self, wearing a camel's hair jacket over his chocolate brown shirt, khaki pants, a flamboyant ascot shielding his neck. His silken white hair seemed pulled back tighter than ever, giving him the look of a matador who had outlived his bulls. His voice, though muted some from his illness, registered strongly, especially when he plunged into his biblical arsenal of obscenities. He moved out from behind his desk, put a chair opposite mine, and issued his first indelicacy. He was talking with a certain delight about Sheila Cudahy, who had come to Farrar, Straus in 1953 as editor in chief after Roger bought her late husband's Chicago book publishing company, Pellegrini & Cudahy.
"She was a goddamn good editor," Roger told me. "Started our children's division, weighed about eighty pounds soaking wet. I'll tell you what she brought in that made her reputation. She brought in Nelson Algren. She spent some time in Chicago working with him on A Walk on the Wild Side, telling him to take 'fuck' out and put 'shit' in. He listened to her and did what she wanted." She must have done good. A Walk on the Wild Side is still in print.
Roger died on May 24, 2004, five months after our conversation. I was lucky to have been with him when he was looking back with some pleasure, I think, at what he had been able to accomplish. It was light-years away from the wealth piled up by past generations of Strauses. His father had been president of the American Mining and Smelting Company; his mother was a Guggenheim whose father owned a copper mine. What Roger sang out at our meeting were some of his personal delights: the discoveries of his life: Carlo Levi's Christ Stopped at Eboli; poet Joseph Brodsky, the author he regarded with the most warmth; Susan Sontag, "my closest friend"; Philip Roth, his best living American "dialogue" writer; Edmund Wilson and Isaac Bashevis Singer, both spirited away from other houses; Gayelord Hauser, the bestselling author who saved Roger's company in those early years.
Hauser's Look Younger, Live Longer was published in 1950 just as the buzzards had begun to circle overhead, ready to pick at the undeveloped bones of Farrar, Straus. Hauser was the Dr. Atkins of his time, a handsome gentleman about town with such dear friends as Greta Garbo, specializing not in low-carb, highprotein diets, but in the blessings offered by yogurt and blackstrap molasses. That mix oozed Look Younger, Live Longer toward a sale of 500,000 copies. "It carried us along for a while," Roger said with a touch of unsettling humility. Most of all, the book helped him take up more ambitious searches, for books that mattered.
Early in his reign, Roger had invited to lunch two successful and hard-drinking partners in a literary agency, Diarmuid Russell and Henry Volkening. ("Drink," a British publisher once observed, "has always been crucial in the book trade," and so will be covered in this book in a measured way.) "We went to their favorite French restaurant," Roger told me, "where a number of martinis were consumed. I finally said, 'I don't want to be too boorish about this, but the reason I'm buying lunch for you guys is that I want to publish the kind of authors that you represent — Welty-like, Malamud-like, blah, blah, blah.' And one of them, probably Henry, said to me, 'Why should we give you an author like you've described until after we've had a chance to show Harcourt, Brace, Scribners, blah, blah, blah?' Jesus Christ, they were right. I wouldn't either if I was in their position."
In those early years it was more or less hit-or-miss publishing. Roger and his wife, Dorothea, went prospecting in Italy, the country they loved. With the help of a well-connected Italian scout, the two brought back Christ Stopped at Eboli and rising young novelists Alberto Moravia, Giovanni Guareschi, and Cesare Pavese.
Since it was in his nature, Roger also aggressively pursued authors from other houses who were known to be aggrieved by their present publishers. One day in the late forties he got a call from an old friend at Random House.
"How would you like to publish Edmund Wilson?" Roger was asked. Wilson had done The Shock of Recognition for Random House's Modern Library, two volumes on the development of literature in the United States.
"Of course I would like to publish Edmund Wilson," Roger said. "Why the fuck aren't you publishing Wilson?"
"Wilson can't stand Bennett and the rest of the boys over there, and I can't hold him." Ah, Roger thought, a chance to upend Bennett Cerf, who not only governed Random House and was one of the most feverish quipsters of his time, but who also delighted in stealing authors from other houses.
Roger called Wilson, and they had lunch. "So I said all the things I'd say when one is in hot pursuit. I asked him what he was working on. He said he was collecting all his essays. 'I'll buy them,' I said right off." Roger didn't remember whether the advance to Wilson was $2,000 or $2,500, "but that's how we began. And," he said with some pride, "he never left me for a moment after that. I published all his books." Edmund Wilson did get on well with Roger Straus, who, he once wrote, "made me laugh and cheered me up."
If Roger had one distinct feeling about his profession, it was an everlasting belief in his writers. "He was there in my thirties, forties, fifties and sixties," John McPhee said, speaking at the memorial service held for Roger in New York, "and was still leading me up the street on a leash when I entered my seventies."
Straus's relationship with his editors, however, was different. He was tough on them, held many in slight regard — perhaps because they were contending with him for authors — and treated them with disdain. One of his strongest editors in chief, Aaron Asher, who brought with him Philip Roth, Brian Moore, and Arthur Miller, among others, spent five years at the house and couldn't stand his boss. Another superb editor, Henry Robbins, who discovered Joan Didion and Tom Wolfe, also ended up fleeing Roger. Partly it had to do with the firing of a woman at Farrar, Straus who meant very much to Robbins, but there were editorial spats as well.
Roger even had difficulties with his son, Roger Straus III. I always found young Roger to be a sweet-natured individual who seemed to fill his difficult role with much grace. But I didn't sense that he had the driving ambition of his father. The breakup came in 1993 when the son left the company over "philosophical differences" with his father. Some people who were there felt that the father had become annoyed with his son for wanting to steer the house in a more commercial direction. Whatever the reason, young Roger worked at Times Books, then settled in as a serious photographer, a profession he still follows.
In the beginning, however, Roger did at least find a partner whom he respected and who brought resolute credentials to the new publishing house.
John Farrar once confessed: "I have no sense of humor and a vile temper." A veteran of two world wars, Farrar had made his reputation right after World War I as editor of the prestigious literary magazine The Bookman. The magazine was then owned by Doubleday, Doran, a powerhouse publisher of the time, where Farrar was also a prominent editor.
In 1929, five months before the Wall Street crash, Farrar left Doubleday, Doran to form a new publishing house with Stanley Rinehart, his business manager on The Bookman, and Stanley's brother, Frederick. The Rinehart boys were sons of Mary Roberts Rinehart, probably the richest bestselling author of her time. She was so rich that she never bothered to look at her royalty notices but, instead, complained to Stanley that she never seemed to receive money from the company. So one Christmas her son bought a huge strongbox and filled it with thousands of one-dollar bills and sent it to his mother for the holiday. "Stanley, dear," she called on Christmas morning, "can you guess what I just received from Farrar & Rinehart? It's unbelievable — a real treasure chest brimming over with crisp new dollar bills. Now I'm worried that your new firm will go bankrupt."
No need to worry about that. One thing John Farrar took with him from Doran was the unsold stock of an unsuccessful Edgar Allan Poe biography that he had previously acquired, written by an unknown professor named Hervey Allen. He had also bought the right to look at a future work by Allen — "a long novel as yet untitled." In 1933, in the teeth of the Great Depression, Farrar, Rinehart offered, for $3 retail, a 1,224-page historical novel by Hervey Allen. The first printing of Anthony Adverse was 17,000. Its second printing was 200,000. In the two years that Anthony Adverse topped the bestseller list, it sold 500,000 copies, and it kept on going and became a competitor to Gone With the Wind over the next twenty years.
Roger Straus was happy to have Farrar with him. "He knew everybody and everybody knew him," Roger said. "They knew he was honest. They knew he was a good editor. He had this respect from among his peers."
Hugh Van Dusen, who became an editor at Harper's in 1956 and stayed on full-time until 2006 (but is still in the office three days a week), had a different take on John Farrar. Hugh met him when he was job hunting. "Farrar knew my parents slightly," Hugh said, "and so my father asked if he would see me." (Hugh's father, Henry P. Van Dusen, was president of Union Theological Seminary in New York.) Farrar invited Hugh to have lunch with him.
"I found Mr. Farrar to be one of the most inarticulate great men I ever met," Hugh said. "He was sort of fumbling around during lunch, trying to find something of importance to say about publishing to this young guy who was just graduating from Harvard." Farrar may have sounded inarticulate, but he was not without a kernel of gold to bequeath the youngster. "As we were about to leave," Hugh recalled, "he stopped and turned to me and, I think, even grabbed my arm for emphasis, and he said, 'You know, publishing is all about memory.'" Perhaps the old Farrar was telling the young Van Dusen that institutional memory has always been vital in book publishing, not just for connecting the past to the present, but also for finding truths from the past that could light up the present and even the future. Farrar provided many such insights to Roger Straus until illness came along and robbed him of his own memory.
In 1955, his company nine years old, and not yet sure of its footing, Roger hired the person he needed most. And he did it even though he understood from the beginning that Robert Giroux's heart would never belong to Daddy. Three years older than Roger, Giroux had been a wunderkind at Columbia University in the mid-1930s, an abiding influence on a group of book-loving students with literary aspirations. Among his classmates were Herman Wouk, John Berryman, Robert Gerdy, who became an editor at The New Yorker, and Thomas Merton. Merton introduced himself to Giroux, then the editor of the literary magazine Columbia Review, in 1935 when he came to show Giroux some of his writings. Merton himself was editor of the college humor magazine, Jester. Thirteen years later, in 1948, it was Giroux who told Merton that his book, The Seven Storey Mountain, would be published by Harcourt, Brace. Giroux had gone to work for Harcourt in 1940 as a junior editor, Merton had entered a Trappist monastery in Kentucky in 1941, and by the time Merton's classic was published, Giroux was a commanding editor of the house.
Roger claimed that he had first gone after Bob Giroux in 1946 when he was putting his company together. At lunch the publisher offered Giroux the job as editor in chief.
"Oh, my God, Roger," Bob said, "I can't afford to."
"What do you mean you can't afford to? We haven't talked about money."
"No, no. What I mean is I have this sinecure with Harcourt, Brace and, you know, you may make it or maybe you won't." Roger thought that was a fair assessment at the time. Bob was also having a good time in his early years at Harcourt. For one, he had inherited Carl Sandburg. "I used to go out with him because he was a troubadour," Bob told me. "He was one of the earliest folk singers, and he published a book at Harcourt called The American Songbook. My favorite song of his was 'My Name Is Sam Hall and I Hate You One and All' Well, he had a noose around his neck; he was going to be hanged."
Bob talked about a convergence of greatness at the Harcourt offices — the meeting of Carl Sandburg and T. S. Eliot. "I know Eliot didn't think much of Sandburg's poems, and Sandburg was very critical of Eliot because, he said, he had no sense of humor. I thought, they must never meet each other because they're on opposite ends of the spectrum politically. Well, one day Eliot visited the offices. And I had him with me, and suddenly one of the secretaries called me and said, 'Mr. Sandburg has just arrived.' And I said, 'Put him in Mr. Harcourt's office,' which was way down at the end. 'I don't want them to meet.' I had to leave Eliot to go to the John or something, and I was probably gone five minutes. When I came back, Carl was sitting in my office, right next to Eliot, and Eliot had a big grin on his face. Carl said, 'Bob, look at that man's face. Look at the suffering in that face.' And Eliot shot back, 'You can't blame him for the people who ride on his coattails.'"
Six years later, when Roger heard that there was trouble at Harcourt, he took Giroux to lunch again and said flat out, "You know, my offer is still open. Do you want to come?"
"Yes, I would," Bob said. He left Harcourt still in a state of rage because management had refused to let him buy a book that was rightfully his — a first novel that the then-unknown author, J. D. Salinger, wanted him to have.
ROBERT GIROUX
Jerry Salinger was publishing these stories, mostly in The New Yorker, and they were, one after another, fantastic. So I wrote him a very short note from Harcourt, care of Bill Shawn, the editor of The New Yorker, a reclusive figure whom I had gotten to know. In the note I said, "I know that every editor in town is asking to see your first novel, but I have a proposal to make. Let me publish all your stories right now." Never heard from him.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Time of Their Lives by Al Silverman. Copyright © 2008 Al Silverman. Excerpted by permission of OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
- Cover Page
- Title Page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Introduction
- Part I: The Newcomers
- 1. You Are What You Publish: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
- 2. Wishing for a Fair Wind: Grove Press
- 3. A Quest to Know More About the World: George Braziller
- 4. An Uncertain Partnership of Equals: Atheneum
- 5. A Most Unusual Cog in the Profession: St. Martin’s Press
- Interlude: The Prettiest Backlist in the Business
- Part II: The Survivors
- 6. Independent Publishing at Its Height: The Viking Press
- 7. The Curious Family Establishment: Doubleday
- 8. The Company That Was Always About Cass: The House of Harper
- 9. Give the Reader a Break: Simon & Schuster
- Interlude: Publishing Was in His Veins
- 10. The Place That Ran by Itself: Random House
- 11. Living in a Dream World: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.
- 12. A Father and Son Story: Little, Brown
- Interlude: Making Memoirs
- Part III: Swirl—The Paperbound Rush to Life
- 13. Ballantine, Avon, Pocket Books, Dell
- 14. New American Library, Bantam, Fawcett
- Interlude: The Gothic Romance
- Image Gallery
- Sources
- Index
- Acknowledgments
- About the Author
- Copyright Page