One Summer: America, 1927

Charles Scribner’s Sons, a family firm founded in 1846, boasted for years that it never published a word that would make a maiden blush, but now found itself struggling to keep up with changing mores. In early 1927, when Maxwell Perkins, its most celebrated editor, was working on Hemingway’s aforementioned volume of short stories, he felt he had to alert Charles Scribner II, the firm’s head, that it contained certain words that might shock him. Perkins was so old-school that he could not bring himself to utter the actual words, but wrote them down. One word he couldn’t even write down. (It was never recorded what the words were or whether any or all of them made it into the finished book.)
    Interestingly, although Scribner’s was squeamish about publishing profanities, it had no hesitation in 1927 in publishing one of the most virulently racist books of the decade, Re-forging America , by the amateur eugenicist Lothrop Stoddard. Mr Stoddard’s previous book with Scribner’s, The Rising Tide of Color Against White World Supremacy , hints a little more clearly at where he stood on matters. In Re-forging America , Stoddard argued that America should create a ‘bi-racial’ society, by which he meant not one in which people mingled harmoniously, but rather the very opposite: one in which whites and non-whites were kept separate from cradle to grave so as not to risk cross-contamination to the detriment of either. The book was favourably reviewed in several places.
     
    While Knopf was carving out a lucrative niche for itself among foreign authors, another new Jewish firm was finding great success by discovering – or in some cases rediscovering – American writers.The firm was Boni & Liveright, named for brothers Albert and Charles Boni and for Horace Liveright, and for a short while it was perhaps the most interesting and dynamic publishing house in America. The Boni brothers had until recently run the Washington Square Bookshop, a leftist hangout on MacDougal Street, and Liveright was a bond salesman. Although the three founders didn’t have a lot of expertise in publishing, the firm quickly made a name for itself.
    The men squabbled endlessly and by the early 1920s both Bonis had departed, leaving Liveright (pronounced, incidentally, ‘live-right’, not ‘liver-right’) as sole head. In the three years 1925 to 1927, he produced what was perhaps the most dazzling parade of quality books ever to emerge from a single publishing house in a concentrated period. They included An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser, Dark Laughter by Sherwood Anderson, In Our Time by Ernest Hemingway (who then eloped to Scribner’s), Soldiers’ Pay by William Faulkner, Enough Rope by Dorothy Parker, Crystal Cup by Gertrude Atherton, My Life by Isadora Duncan, Education and the Good Life by Bertrand Russell, Napoleon by Emil Ludwig, The Thibaults by Roger Martin du Gard (forgotten now, but he was soon to win a Nobel Prize), The Golden Day by Lewis Mumford, three plays by Eugene O’Neill, volumes of poems by T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, E. E. Cummings, Edgar Lee Masters and Robinson Jeffers, and a work of cheery froth by Hollywood screenwriter Anita Loos called Gentlemen Prefer Blondes . Purporting to be the diary of a dizzy golddigger named Lorelei Lee, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes wasn’t great literature, but it sold and sold and sold. James Joyce was said to be enchanted by it.
    Liveright was a great publisher but a terrible businessman. He gave advances that were too indulgent, employed far more people than he needed to and paid them more than he should have. Because of his bad business decisions, Boni & Liveright made profits of just $1,203 in 1927 and was in serious danger of going out of business.
    Liveright exacerbated matters considerably by investing heavily, and generally unsuccessfully, in the stock market and on Broadway. In 1927 he found temporary salvation from an unlikely source. He brought over from London a play that had been a big success there: Dracula . For the American production, he selected a little-known Hungarian actor named Bela Lugosi. Although Lugosi had been in America for six years, he still spoke little English and learned his lines phonetically, without really understanding what they meant, which gave him interesting diction. Lugosi had started his career playing romantic leads, but in 1926 he played a villain in a small but memorably named movie called The Devil in the Cheese . On the strength