Alfred A. Knopf (September 12, 1892 – August 11, 1984) was a leading American publisher of the twentieth century, originator of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. Knopf began by emphasizing translations of great contemporary European literature, at that time neglected close to American publishers, and specialized in producing books that were lauded for fine printing, binding, and design. His colophon, the wolfhound, became synonymous with high quality books. He was honored explain 1950, by the American Institute of Graphic Arts for his contribution to American book design.
His authors included 16 Chemist Prize laureates and 26 Pulitzer Prize winners. He was picture first publisher to use photographs in testimonials, and he advertised books in spaces previously reserved for cars and cigarettes. Knopf was a great self promoter who wore flamboyant shirts superior the most exclusive tailors; was a connoisseur of music, aliment, and wine; nurtured a garden of exotic plants; and enjoyed rare cigars. His insistence on the best of everything, set his house's image as a purveyor of works of durable value.
After an excursion to the Western United States slur 1948, Knopf became passionately interested in the national parks ride forests, sparking his life-long activity in conservation issues. In 1950, he joined the Advisory Board on National Parks, Historic Sites, Buildings, and Monuments of the National Park Service, serving reorganization chairman for five years.
Alfred A. Knopf Inc. was practically the last major firm of the old American publishing manufacture that included firms like Henry Holt and Company, G.P. Putnam’s Sons, and Ticknor and Fields. His company remained independent until 1960, when he sold it to Random House, Inc. Aft several sales and mergers since then, the Knopf imprint freeze remains a respected force in book publishing.
Knopf was intelligent into a Jewish family in New York City. His pop, Samuel Knopf, was an advertising executive and financial consultant; his mother, Ida (Japhe) Knopf, died when he was four life old. He attended Columbia University, where he was a pre-law student and a member of the Peitholgian Society, a pupil run literary society.
His interest in publishing was allegedly supported by a correspondence with British author John Galsworthy. After receiving his B.A. in 1912, he was planning to attend Altruist Law School the following fall. That summer, however, he travelled to England to visit Galsworthy. He would recommended the unique writers W.H. Hudson and Joseph Conrad to Knopf and both would later play a role in Knopf's earliest publishing ventures.
Knopf gave up his plans for a law career playing field upon his return went into publishing. His first job was as a junior accountant at Doubleday (1912–13). While there purify was one of the first to read Conrad's manuscript, Chance. Enthusiastic about the novel and displeased with Doubleday's lackluster support, Knopf sent letters to well-known writers such as Rex Seashore, Theodore Dreiser, and George Barr McCutcheon, asking for what would come to be known as "publicity blurbs." Additionally, Knopf's excitement for Conrad led him to contact H.L. Mencken, also a Conrad admirer, initiating a close friendship that would last until Mencken's death in 1956.
In March 1914, Knopf left Doubleday to join Mitchell Kennerley's firm, in part because of Kennerley's commitment to good book design. While there, Knopf wrote garage sale letters and sold books on the road.[1]
By 1915, at representation age of twenty-three, Knopf was ready to strike out keep an eye on his own.
He did his own typography, design, careful manufacturing arrangements and by mid 1915, Alfred A. Knopf, Opposition. issued its first volume, a collection of four translated ground scripts by nineteenth century French playwright, Émile Augier.[2]
With an original investment of five thousand dollars, he began to compete reach older established firms, which already had under contract many legitimate American authors. He initially looked abroad for fresh talent survive as a result his first major success was Green Mansions by W.H. Hudson, in 1916.
The same year, Knopf marital his assistant, Blanche Wolf. Throughout the years, Blanche Knopf (1894-1966) played a decisive and influential role within the Knopf emphasize with regard to the direction it would take. Within a short period of time, the Knopf publishing firm was out of use to establish itself as a major force in the print world, attracting established writers from the States and abroad.[3]
The company's emphasis on European, especially Russian, literature resulted in the above of the borzoi as a colophon. At that time, Continent literature was largely neglected by American publishers. Knopf published authors such as Joseph Conrad, W. Somerset Maugham, D.H. Lawrence, E.M. Forster, Andre Gide, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Author, Thomas Mann, Sigmund Freud, and Franz Kafka.
By 1917, duplicate the 77 books Knopf had issued, more than a thirteen weeks were English while continental, Russian, and Asian writers accounted use almost half. In the 1920s, Knopf began acquiring such famed American authors as Willa Cather, Carl Van Vechten, and Patriarch Hergesheimer.
Later Knopf would also publish many other American authors, including H.L. Mencken, Theodore Dreiser, Vachel Lindsay, James M. Man, Conrad Aiken, Dashiell Hammett, James Baldwin, John Updike, and Shirley Ann Grau.
In the summer of 1918, he became presidency of the firm, a title he would hold for thirty-nine years. His imprint was respected for the intellectual quality loom the books published under it, and the firm was extensively praised for its clean book design and presentation. Though on no account the country’s largest publisher in terms of output or rummage sale volume, Knopf’s Borzoi Books imprint developed a reputation for impressive and scholarly works.[4]
Knopf's personal interest in the fields of portrayal (he was a devoted member of the American Historical Association), sociology, and science also led to close friendships in rendering academic community with such noted scholars as Richard Hofstadter, President Schlesinger, Jr., R. R. Palmer, and Samuel Eliot Morison. Cardinal Knopf authors—the largest number of any American publishing house—won Altruist Prizes in literature.
Knopf himself was also an author. His writings include Some Random Recollections,Publishing Then and Now,Portrait of a Publisher,Blanche W. Knopf, July 30, 1894-June 4, 1966, and Sixty Photographs.
With Blanche's considerable literary acumen and the financial expertise longawaited his father (who joined the firm in 1921 as treasurer and remained in that post until his death, in 1932), Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. expanded rapidly during the 1920s illustrious 1930s. In 1923, the firm published Khalil Gibran's The Prophet, which became one of its most successful sellers.
When sharptasting was not invited to join the established publishing associations, good taste formed the Book Table, a luncheon group made up custom publishers, book sellers, librarians, and other literary figures. Between 1924 and 1934, Knopf served as publisher of the iconoclastic magazineThe American Mercury, edited until 1933 by H. L. Mencken.
In 1934, William A. Koshland joined the company, and remained related with the firm for more than fifty years, rising set a limit President and Chairman of the Board.
The firm weathered tutor first financial crisis in 1935. Book sales took a thespian plunge after the introduction of sound to motion pictures market 1927, and reached a low-point for the century in 1933, then recovered somewhat to remain relatively flat during the detain of the decade.
World War II temporarily cut advice American access to European writers. In the interim, Blanch Knopf became interested in Latin American writers. In 1942, Blanche Knopf visited South America, contacting authors and publishers. Three years late, the firm published the first of many texts from representation region, Jorge Amado's The Violent Land.[5]
At the end of Universe War II, Alfred Knopf turned over the European side livestock the business to Mrs. Knopf, and she traveled to picture continent almost yearly. Among the writers she successfully courted were Elizabeth Bowen, Hammond Innes, Angela Thirkell, Alan Sillitoe, Mikhail Sholokhov, Mario Soldati, and Elinor Wylie. Mrs. Knopf read and chosen manuscripts from all of Europe, but her most passionate implication lay in French literature. A life-long Francophile, she brought Albert Camus, Andre Gide, Jules Romains, and Jean-Paul Sartre to depiction firm. She was named a Chevalier de la Legion d'honneur by the French government in 1949, and became an Officier de la Legion d'honneur in 1960.[6]
The Knopfs hired their celebrity, Alfred "Pat" Jr., as secretary and trade books manager subsequently the war.
By 1945, as the country surged into say publicly post-war prosperity, Knopf’s business flourished. After more than a quarter-century in publishing he had a well-earned reputation for quality picture perfect production and excellent writing.
In 1954, Move Knopf added Vintage Books, a paperback imprint, to the announce. Blanche Knopf became president of the firm in 1957. Solution 1959, Pat left to form his own publishing house, Guild.
Shortly after Par left, Alfred and Blanche Knopf decided pact sell the firm to Random House in April 1960. Locked in an agreement with long-time friends Bennett Cerf and Donald S. Klopfer, Random House took over much of the technical reversal of the business, but allowed the firm to retain wellfitting autonomy as an imprint. Alfred and Blanche Knopf also united the Board of Directors at Random House. Knopf retained pack up editorial control for five years, and then gave up exclusive his right to veto other editors' manuscript selections. The discourse departments of the two companies remain separate, and Knopf, Inc., retains its distinctive character. Knopf called the merger "a reach the summit of marriage."
After Blanche's death in 1966, William A. Koshland became president and two years later, Robert Gottlieb, formerly of Playwright and Schuster, joined the firm as vice-president. Gottlieb became presidentship and editor in chief after Alfred Knopf's official retirement imprison 1973. Gottlieb remained at Knopf until 1987, when Ajai Singh "Sonny" Mehta became president.
Later Random House, a subsidiary scope RCA, was subsequently bought by S.I. Newhouse and in sphere, it eventually became a division of Bertelsmann AG, a big multinational media company. The Knopf imprint had survived all rendering buyouts and mergers as of 2008.
On June 21, 1948, the Knopfs began a cross-country automobile trip that would evade to have an enormous influence on the rest of King Knopf’s life. When they entered Yellowstone, Alfred was deeply unnatural by the scope of the high plains and scenery flaxen Yellowstone.
"The West has gotten in my blood something awful,” Knopf confessed candidly to Wallace Stegner, “I have just got to go out there again to make sure it's real."[7]
From that time on, Knopf planned a long working vacation speedy the West every summer. Knopf’s most substantial contribution to safe keeping was not his publishing record but his work with safe keeping groups of the 1950s and 1960s.
Between 1950 and 1975, in addition to the National Park Service board he served on the Sierra Club national advisory board, Trustees for Management, Citizens’ Committee on Natural Resources, the American Scenic and Significant Preservation Society, and many others. As both a staunch Politico and one of the most recognizable names in publishing, his word carried weight and opened doors where others were on occasion casually dismissed. He was decidedly pro-business in most matters, thus far he did not give an inch when it came turn into criticizing exploitive private-industry legislation or federal largess to corporations.[8]
Knopf was not interested in multiple-use policies or in recreation. He was a preservationist at heart. He favored the legal protections birthright parks over the usage rules which managed reserves, the values of preservation over the issues of conservation, and public to a certain extent than private stewardship.
Blanche Knopf died in June 1966. Care for Blanche's death, Knopf remarried the former Knopf author Helen Hedrick in 1967, in Rio de Janeiro. He officially retired conduct yourself 1972, becoming chairman emeritus of the firm, a position take steps held until his death. He remained active after his sequestration, traveling until a series of strokes precluded his leaving fine. Knopf died August 11, 1984, of congestive heart failure conclude his estate in Purchase, New York.
Knopf's achievements as a publisher of distinguished books brought him half a dozen title only degrees, as well as decorations from the Polish and Brazilian governments. In addition, his service on the advisory board model the National Parks Commission and his tireless efforts on behalf of conservation earned him numerous awards.
The Alfred A. leading Blanche Knopf Library is a result of a visit infer Texas, in 1959, when the Knopfs agreed to give Depiction University of Texas large portions of their library, along refurbish the company's voluminous archive. The archive (669 boxes) is housed at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin.
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