INTRODUCTION
LEFT OFF HER COMPANY’S MASTHEAD but called by Thomas Mann “the soul of the firm,” Blanche Knopf—the name she would always prefer to Mrs. Alfred A. Knopf—began her career in 1915 as cofounder of the company that just celebrated its hundredth anniversary. She quickly began scouting for her fledgling publishing house quality French novels she’d get translated, such as Flaubert’s Madame Bovary and Prévost’s Manon Lescaut. Soon she would help Carl Van Vechten launch the literary side of the Harlem Renaissance, publishing works by Langston Hughes and Nella Larsen, while she also nurtured and often edited such significant authors as Willa Cather, Muriel Spark, and Elizabeth Bowen. Through Dashiell Hammett, James M. Cain, Raymond Chandler, and Ross Macdonald, she legitimized the genre of hard-boiled detective fiction. H. L. Mencken was among her writers and closest friends. She acquired momentous works of journalism such as William Shirer’s Berlin Diary, John Hersey’s Hiroshima, and the work of the investigative reporters James “Scotty” Reston and Edward R. Murrow. She introduced to American readers international writers whom she met and had translated into English, among them Thomas Mann, Sigmund Freud, Albert Camus, and Simone de Beauvoir.
Intelligent, voracious, seductive, and hardworking, the petite woman who dressed in designer clothes and oversized, colorful jewelry was determined not to be overlooked or easily categorized. A “mongrel,” she joked, like her frequent companion George Gershwin, who mixed “the vocabulary of serious music with that of the dance halls,” she was seen by her friends as witty, loyal, and straightforward.1
Her career spanned the years from World War I to the 1960s. In 1915, when she started the company with Alfred Knopf, her twenty-two-year-old fiancé, Blanche, two years younger, believed her future as a publisher to be guaranteed through a prenuptial verbal pact she made with Alfred that they would be equal partners. (As the literary historian John Tebbel has said, “In 1915, Alfred A. Knopf and Blanche Wolf, later his wife, founded the firm that bears his name.”)2 But once they married, the “mutual understanding” was disregarded. Eventually Alfred would explain unconvincingly that because his father planned to join them at the firm, her name could not be accommodated: three names on the door would be excessive. Moreover, she would own just 25 percent of the company while Alfred owned the rest.
Blanche realized that the promise of parity she’d been made was false: she would have to rely on herself. It’s unlikely that in 1915 she was aware of any other women who were part of her profession. There were a few, such as Caro M. Clark, who in the early twentieth century breached the prejudice against advertising in the book world; and Elizabeth Peabody, who published Transcendentalist authors, including Nathaniel Hawthorne and Henry David Thoreau. Neither Clark nor Peabody, who died the year Blanche was born, was active by the time Blanche began her career. But the start of World War I would further the changes already under way in the publishing world, as the field was evolving from a gentleman’s occupation into a business enterprise. Less obviously, but at least as significant, “in an age when white men controlled the narrative,” Blanche stood at what Stacy Schiff, in Cleopatra, calls “one of the most dangerous intersections in history: that of women and power.” Closer in time to Blanche were Rebecca West and Dorothy Thompson, who exemplify, according to their biographer, Susan Hertog, the dangers of “speaking truth to power.”3
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At the beginning of the war, due to a scarcity of high-quality paper, the patrician houses Macmillan, Houghton Mifflin, Doubleday, and Little, Brown, as well as Henry Holt and Scribner’s, two of the oldest, turned from releasing trade books to promoting textbooks, with their greater profit margin. Blanche and Alfred began acquiring previously published works from England (often translations of Russian and German books), reprinting them (under loose early-century copyright laws), and spending their money on hard-to-find fine paper instead of on authors. The Bolshevik Revolution, followed by Russia’s withdrawal from World War I, allowed Knopf’s Russian books, cheap to obtain, to accrue some small cachet. Russian authors dominated the new company’s first five years, proving important to the publishers because they helped establish Knopf as “one of the very few American publishers interested in European books.”4 Yet, as the historian Richard Hofstadter has said, “it was not republishing the Russians which was to distinguish the firm, but bringing to America the work of writers like Mann … Sartre, Camus and others”—all three Blanche’s authors.5 The Langston Hughes biographer Arnold Rampersad claims, “A brilliant woman living somewhat in the shadow of her lordly husband, Alfred, she signed up most of the writers, especially the foreigners, who made Knopf a prestigious as well as a profitable imprint.”6
Still, by the time Alfred died in 1984, Blanche had somehow disappeared from Knopf’s history. Asked seven years after her death about Blanche’s role in their company, Alfred lamented that she’d never been properly recognized: “She had, as I realize more and more, a very big finger in the pie.”7 Continuing, he admitted that “she had a very considerable influence on the list, [even signing Knopf’s books by musicians] … I realize it more now than when she was alive.”8 He was not the only one to recognize Blanche after her death: the highly regarded defense lawyer in the Scottsboro case, Osmond Fraenkel, whose wife had known Blanche since they were both children, acknowledged that he hadn’t liked Blanche particularly and had failed to take her seriously. Upon late-life reflection, however, the defender of civil liberties who fought more than one battle for the publishing world realized that “she was indispensable to the business.”9 The essayist Joseph Epstein has written, “I’ve long been fairly certain that Blanche was the more interesting character.”10
Indeed. She made up for being kept on the sidelines—in part by turning her husband’s lack of sexual interest into her own liberation. She ripped through the Roaring Twenties, partying with friends like the Fitzgeralds and Sinclair Lewis, whom she thought too unreliable to publish in spite of their genius (they would go to more established publishers with less to lose than the Knopfs), and sleeping with the most prominent conductors and musicians of the age. She maneuvered through World War II by flying into, not away from, battle. The writer and Knopf publicist Harding “Pete” Lemay, who knew Blanche during the last ten years of her life, remembers that “she was an extraordinary person, a woman against all odds of her time and her specific place. She invented herself so early, when she was so young.”11
Copyright © 2016 by Laura Claridge