Boni & Liveright
Encyclopedia
Boni & Liveright was a publishing house established in 1916 in New York City by Albert Boni and Horace Liveright
which made a name by publishing work considered avant-garde
and in so doing published work by many modernist authors. They attracted attention from the Society for Suppression of Vice
for contracting with James Joyce
to publish an American edition of "Ulysses". They marketed books to an audience in the northeast and California, and in 1917 began the Modern Library imprint which reissued work written by European authors. The business failed during the Great Depression
, although an employee bought and continued to publish the Modern Library
books.
, H. G. Wells
, and Kipling. In the post-World War I years, through the roaring twenties to the Great Depression, there were fewer than 500 bookstores in the country, all clustered around major cities and areas of population. Boni & Liveright, like other new publishers of the era such as Alfred A. Knopf
, sold to customers predominantly in the northeast and California. In general the US was not considered much of a "book-reading" country and most publishers failed to reach a mass readership.
Boni, who was employed in an office before joining Liveright in the publishing business, had an idea to publish reprints of European writers, and in 1917 the company started the publication of the Modern Library
series, which they later sold to an employee, Bennett Cerf
. The Modern Library series became instantly popular, "selling hundreds of thousands of copies". Although he seldom read manuscripts himself, Liveright gambled on authors that sold well in the 1920s.Eugene O'Neill's play Strange Interlude
sold more than 100,000 copies.
and even immoral according to anti-vice societies of the period. They published works by modernist authors such as Theodore Dreiser
, John Reed, Eugene O'Neill
, Leo Stein
, Conrad Aiken
, Hilda Doolittle, Sherwood Anderson
, Ernest Hemingway
, Ezra Pound
, e.e. cummings and William Faulkner
.
In 1917 Alfred Knopf
, another newly established New York publishing house, published Ezra Pound
's Lustra to poor reviews and sales. The following year Boni & Liveright agreed to publish for Pound a collection of prose, Instigations, which included an essay by Ernest Fenellosa. Boni & Liveright bought Pound's next volume of poetry, Poems: 1918-1921; the publisher's inclusion of the date in the title was considered daring and innovative. Liveright traveled to Paris to meet with Pound where he was introduced to and made arrangements with James Joyce
and T.S. Eliot to publish their work. Liveright published Pound's Personae in 1925, retaining rights to the work well into the 1940s after the company collapsed and submerged with Random House
.
In 1921 Boni & Liveright agreed to publish James Joyce's Ulysses, but were forced to withdraw from the contract because of actions by the Society for Suppression of Vice
that brought censure from the authorities. The firm published T.S. Eliot's poem The Waste Land
in 1922; that year Eliot also published the work in the first issue of The Criterion
, a British literary magazine
.
David Welky writes in Everything was Better in America: Print Culture in the Great Depression, that Liveright was a gregarious handsome man who hired talented employees. Lillian Hellman
worked in the advertising department and read manuscripts; many of his other employees went on to start well-known publishing houses, such as Julian Messner of Messner, Leon Shimkin of Simon & Shuster, and Cerf, who bought the Modern Library series, and established Random House
. Although known as an artistic and even exciting publishing house in the 1920s, the company did not survive increased commercialization in the business and collapsed in 1930.
Horace Liveright
Horace Brisbin Liveright was an American publisher and stage producer. With Albert Boni, he founded the Modern Library and Boni & Liveright publishers. He published books from numerous influential American and British authors...
which made a name by publishing work considered avant-garde
Avant-garde
Avant-garde means "advance guard" or "vanguard". The adjective form is used in English to refer to people or works that are experimental or innovative, particularly with respect to art, culture, and politics....
and in so doing published work by many modernist authors. They attracted attention from the Society for Suppression of Vice
New York Society for the Suppression of Vice
The New York Society for the Suppression of Vice was an institution dedicated to supervising the morality of the public, founded in 1873. Its specific mission was to monitor compliance with state laws and work with the courts and district attorneys in bringing offenders to justice. It and its...
for contracting with James Joyce
James Joyce
James Augustine Aloysius Joyce was an Irish novelist and poet, considered to be one of the most influential writers in the modernist avant-garde of the early 20th century...
to publish an American edition of "Ulysses". They marketed books to an audience in the northeast and California, and in 1917 began the Modern Library imprint which reissued work written by European authors. The business failed during the Great Depression
Great Depression
The Great Depression was a severe worldwide economic depression in the decade preceding World War II. The timing of the Great Depression varied across nations, but in most countries it started in about 1929 and lasted until the late 1930s or early 1940s...
, although an employee bought and continued to publish the Modern Library
Modern Library
The Modern Library is a publishing company. Founded in 1917 by Albert Boni and Horace Liveright as an imprint of their publishing company Boni & Liveright, it was purchased in 1925 by Bennett Cerf and Donald Klopfer...
books.
Modern library series
In contrast to more traditional and conservative American publishing companies, often located in Boston, Boni & Liveright was located in New York. They introduced to American readers many European authors such as Checkhov, Dostoyevsky, Ibsen, Nietsche, TolstoyTolstoy
Tolstoy, or Tolstoi is a prominent family of Russian nobility, descending from Andrey Kharitonovich Tolstoy who served under Vasily II of Moscow...
, H. G. Wells
H. G. Wells
Herbert George Wells was an English author, now best known for his work in the science fiction genre. He was also a prolific writer in many other genres, including contemporary novels, history, politics and social commentary, even writing text books and rules for war games...
, and Kipling. In the post-World War I years, through the roaring twenties to the Great Depression, there were fewer than 500 bookstores in the country, all clustered around major cities and areas of population. Boni & Liveright, like other new publishers of the era such as Alfred A. Knopf
Alfred A. Knopf
Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. is a New York publishing house, founded by Alfred A. Knopf, Sr. in 1915. It was acquired by Random House in 1960 and is now part of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group at Random House. The publishing house is known for its borzoi trademark , which was designed by co-founder...
, sold to customers predominantly in the northeast and California. In general the US was not considered much of a "book-reading" country and most publishers failed to reach a mass readership.
Boni, who was employed in an office before joining Liveright in the publishing business, had an idea to publish reprints of European writers, and in 1917 the company started the publication of the Modern Library
Modern Library
The Modern Library is a publishing company. Founded in 1917 by Albert Boni and Horace Liveright as an imprint of their publishing company Boni & Liveright, it was purchased in 1925 by Bennett Cerf and Donald Klopfer...
series, which they later sold to an employee, Bennett Cerf
Bennett Cerf
Bennett Alfred Cerf was a publisher and co-founder of Random House. Cerf was also known for his own compilations of jokes and puns, for regular personal appearances lecturing across the United States, and for his television appearances in the panel game show What's My Line?.-Biography:Bennett Cerf...
. The Modern Library series became instantly popular, "selling hundreds of thousands of copies". Although he seldom read manuscripts himself, Liveright gambled on authors that sold well in the 1920s.Eugene O'Neill's play Strange Interlude
Strange Interlude
Strange Interlude is an experimental play by American playwright Eugene O'Neill. O'Neill finished the play in 1923, but it was not produced on Broadway until 1928, when it won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Lynn Fontanne originated the central role of Nina Leeds on Broadway...
sold more than 100,000 copies.
Modernist writers
The aim of the company was to publish work by modern authors. Boni & Liveright often printed works by authors considered to be avant-gardeAvant-garde
Avant-garde means "advance guard" or "vanguard". The adjective form is used in English to refer to people or works that are experimental or innovative, particularly with respect to art, culture, and politics....
and even immoral according to anti-vice societies of the period. They published works by modernist authors such as Theodore Dreiser
Theodore Dreiser
Theodore Herman Albert Dreiser was an American novelist and journalist of the naturalist school. His novels often featured main characters who succeeded at their objectives despite a lack of a firm moral code, and literary situations that more closely resemble studies of nature than tales of...
, John Reed, Eugene O'Neill
Eugene O'Neill
Eugene Gladstone O'Neill was an American playwright and Nobel laureate in Literature. His poetically titled plays were among the first to introduce into American drama techniques of realism earlier associated with Russian playwright Anton Chekhov, Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen, and Swedish...
, Leo Stein
Leo Stein
Leo Stein was an American art collector and critic. He was born in Allegheny, Pennsylvania, the older brother of Gertrude Stein. He became an influential promoter of 20th-century paintings. Beginning in 1892, he studied at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, for two years. The...
, Conrad Aiken
Conrad Aiken
Conrad Potter Aiken was an American novelist and poet, whose work includes poetry, short stories, novels, a play and an autobiography.-Early years:...
, Hilda Doolittle, Sherwood Anderson
Sherwood Anderson
Sherwood Anderson was an American novelist and short story writer. His most enduring work is the short story sequence Winesburg, Ohio. Writers he has influenced include Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, John Steinbeck, J. D. Salinger, and Amos Oz.-Early life:Anderson was born in Clyde, Ohio,...
, Ernest Hemingway
Ernest Hemingway
Ernest Miller Hemingway was an American author and journalist. His economic and understated style had a strong influence on 20th-century fiction, while his life of adventure and his public image influenced later generations. Hemingway produced most of his work between the mid-1920s and the...
, Ezra Pound
Ezra Pound
Ezra Weston Loomis Pound was an American expatriate poet and critic and a major figure in the early modernist movement in poetry...
, e.e. cummings and William Faulkner
William Faulkner
William Cuthbert Faulkner was an American writer from Oxford, Mississippi. Faulkner worked in a variety of media; he wrote novels, short stories, a play, poetry, essays and screenplays during his career...
.
In 1917 Alfred Knopf
Alfred A. Knopf
Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. is a New York publishing house, founded by Alfred A. Knopf, Sr. in 1915. It was acquired by Random House in 1960 and is now part of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group at Random House. The publishing house is known for its borzoi trademark , which was designed by co-founder...
, another newly established New York publishing house, published Ezra Pound
Ezra Pound
Ezra Weston Loomis Pound was an American expatriate poet and critic and a major figure in the early modernist movement in poetry...
's Lustra to poor reviews and sales. The following year Boni & Liveright agreed to publish for Pound a collection of prose, Instigations, which included an essay by Ernest Fenellosa. Boni & Liveright bought Pound's next volume of poetry, Poems: 1918-1921; the publisher's inclusion of the date in the title was considered daring and innovative. Liveright traveled to Paris to meet with Pound where he was introduced to and made arrangements with James Joyce
James Joyce
James Augustine Aloysius Joyce was an Irish novelist and poet, considered to be one of the most influential writers in the modernist avant-garde of the early 20th century...
and T.S. Eliot to publish their work. Liveright published Pound's Personae in 1925, retaining rights to the work well into the 1940s after the company collapsed and submerged with Random House
Random House
Random House, Inc. is the largest general-interest trade book publisher in the world. It has been owned since 1998 by the German private media corporation Bertelsmann and has become the umbrella brand for Bertelsmann book publishing. Random House also has a movie production arm, Random House Films,...
.
In 1921 Boni & Liveright agreed to publish James Joyce's Ulysses, but were forced to withdraw from the contract because of actions by the Society for Suppression of Vice
New York Society for the Suppression of Vice
The New York Society for the Suppression of Vice was an institution dedicated to supervising the morality of the public, founded in 1873. Its specific mission was to monitor compliance with state laws and work with the courts and district attorneys in bringing offenders to justice. It and its...
that brought censure from the authorities. The firm published T.S. Eliot's poem The Waste Land
The Waste Land
The Waste Land[A] is a 434-line[B] modernist poem by T. S. Eliot published in 1922. It has been called "one of the most important poems of the 20th century." Despite the poem's obscurity—its shifts between satire and prophecy, its abrupt and unannounced changes of speaker, location and time, its...
in 1922; that year Eliot also published the work in the first issue of The Criterion
The Criterion (magazine)
The Criterion was a British literary magazine published from October 1922 to January 1939. The Criterion was, for most of its run, a quarterly journal, although for a period in 1927-28 it was published monthly. It was created by the poet, dramatist, and literary critic T. S...
, a British literary magazine
Literary magazine
A literary magazine is a periodical devoted to literature in a broad sense. Literary magazines usually publish short stories, poetry and essays along with literary criticism, book reviews, biographical profiles of authors, interviews and letters...
.
David Welky writes in Everything was Better in America: Print Culture in the Great Depression, that Liveright was a gregarious handsome man who hired talented employees. Lillian Hellman
Lillian Hellman
Lillian Florence "Lily" Hellman was an American playwright, linked throughout her life with many left-wing causes...
worked in the advertising department and read manuscripts; many of his other employees went on to start well-known publishing houses, such as Julian Messner of Messner, Leon Shimkin of Simon & Shuster, and Cerf, who bought the Modern Library series, and established Random House
Random House
Random House, Inc. is the largest general-interest trade book publisher in the world. It has been owned since 1998 by the German private media corporation Bertelsmann and has become the umbrella brand for Bertelsmann book publishing. Random House also has a movie production arm, Random House Films,...
. Although known as an artistic and even exciting publishing house in the 1920s, the company did not survive increased commercialization in the business and collapsed in 1930.
Sources
- Sieburth, Richard. "Editor's Afterword". in Ezra Pound's New Selected Poems and Translation. (2010). New York: New Directions.
- Welky, David. (2008) Everything was Better in America: Print Culture in the Great Depression. University of Illinois.