Free Another Life by Michael Korda Page A

the most restricted of professions—“an occupation for gentlemen,” as publishers once liked to describe it. Culture and literature, it was felt, needed to be kept in the right hands—namely, those of white Anglo-Saxon Protestants who knew the difference between what was shoddy and meretricious and what was genuinely important and uplifting and who did not engage in “sharp” business practices.
    Until the 1920s, book publishing in America was dominated by old, “respectable” houses that, for the most part, didn’t hire Jews—certainlynot at an executive level—and published Jewish writers only with reluctance. In Boston, there were Houghton Mifflin, Little, Brown, the Atlantic Monthly Press; in New York, Harcourt, Brace, Harper and Brothers, Scribner’s, G. P. Putnam, Doubleday, and Macmillan. Many of these firms were still owned by descendants of the men who had founded them in the mid-nineteenth century. Going from Harvard, Yale, or Princeton into book publishing was a little bit like entering a rather stuffy and self-important club. It was hard to make a real killing, but you had job security and the satisfaction of being among well-educated gentlemen of your own persuasion, pursuing an old, even noble profession.
    The one exception to this rule was the house of Boni and Liveright, founded in 1917 and dominated by the mercurial figure of Horace Liveright, who had almost immediately driven out the peaceful Boni. Not only was Liveright the first Jew to break into book publishing in any significant way, he also single-handedly brought about a revolution in the way books were published. He broke every tradition by publishing daring, even shocking books, and he set out to make books into news , becoming the first publisher to plan out an active publicity campaign for each title. Liveright was an enthusiast, with a huge appetite for anything that was new or controversial. Above all, he wanted to have a good time publishing books, and, by and large, he did.
    Liveright himself eventually died impoverished and disgraced, but his example inspired others who had come under his spell. Dick Simon had been a salesman at Boni and Liveright, Bennett Cerf not only worked at Boni and Liveright, but bought the Modern Library, the crown jewel of Liveright’s ramshackle empire. Even Alfred A. Knopf, though he deeply distrusted Liveright, was inspired by Liveright’s example to found his own publishing house.
    Thus, in the late twenties and thirties, there emerged houses that were owned by Jews who were willing to take risks, knew how to promote and market books, and, however seriously they might take themselves, thought that publishing ought to be fun . That is not to say that they weren’t serious businessmen, nor that the profit motive wasn’t important to them, but they brought a more flamboyant and adventurous approach to publishing than any of the older WASP firms had ever considered. What is more, they prospered. World War Two not only increased the number of readers—as every soldier knows, a lot of servicelife is spent waiting, and books filled in the time—it brought Jews and Gentiles together in large numbers for the first time, the common experience of war erasing many of the differences that had separated them.
    When the war was finally over, book publishing had changed dramatically. Random House, Simon and Schuster, Viking Press (founded by Harold Guinzburg, in 1925), and Alfred A. Knopf were now mainstream houses, more interesting places to work than the old-line firms, and rapidly approaching them in size and influence. By the 1950s, there were Jews working in positions of power in the old-line houses and Gentiles working in the firms owned by Jews—the line separating them had not exactly vanished, but it had been blurred. Still, a Jewish CEO at, say, Harper, was as unlikely as a Gentile one at S&S or Random House.
    To all these distinctions I was entirely blind. I was, as well, completely ignorant of