Book contents
- The Cambridge History of American Modernism
- The Cambridge History of American Modernism
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Chronology
- Introduction
- Part I Methodologies
- Part II Forms, Genre, and Media
- 7 New Visual Media
- 8 Midwestern Modernism and the Radio
- 9 Modernist Writing and Painting
- 10 Modern Folk, Modernist Documentary
- 11 Skyscraper Organizations
- 12 The Jazz Age
- 13 Modernism’s Deep Roots
- 14 Modernizing the American Short Story
- 15 Modernist American Long Poems
- 16 The Modernist Lyric and Its Discontents
- 17 Anthologies
- 18 Fragile Realism
- 19 Post-World War II Theater and Media
- 20 The Limits of an American Modernist Avant-Garde
- 21 Magazines
- 22 The Modernist Presses
- 23 Literary Criticism
- 24 Libertad Bajo Palabra
- Part III Situating US Modernism
- Select Bibliography
- Index
22 - The Modernist Presses
from Part II - Forms, Genre, and Media
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 13 July 2023
- The Cambridge History of American Modernism
- The Cambridge History of American Modernism
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Chronology
- Introduction
- Part I Methodologies
- Part II Forms, Genre, and Media
- 7 New Visual Media
- 8 Midwestern Modernism and the Radio
- 9 Modernist Writing and Painting
- 10 Modern Folk, Modernist Documentary
- 11 Skyscraper Organizations
- 12 The Jazz Age
- 13 Modernism’s Deep Roots
- 14 Modernizing the American Short Story
- 15 Modernist American Long Poems
- 16 The Modernist Lyric and Its Discontents
- 17 Anthologies
- 18 Fragile Realism
- 19 Post-World War II Theater and Media
- 20 The Limits of an American Modernist Avant-Garde
- 21 Magazines
- 22 The Modernist Presses
- 23 Literary Criticism
- 24 Libertad Bajo Palabra
- Part III Situating US Modernism
- Select Bibliography
- Index
Summary
When we think of US modernist presses, a series of images comes to mind: Horace Liveright, who issued T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land alongside bestselling novels and popular theater plays; Alfred Knopf and his wife Blanche, who promoted the new African American literature and original crime fiction by Dashiell Hammett; B. W. Huebsch, who published Sherwood Anderson, James Joyce, and D. H. Lawrence, but also radical political texts. This chapter focuses on the diversity of American modernist presses – from avant-garde imprints to long-established houses, from limited editions to inexpensive reprints. The period between the wars has been mythologized as a “golden age.” This chapter scraps the gold to reveal a more nuanced picture of the publishing landscape. As Bennett Cerf (the owner of the Modern Library) declared, flamboyant but dysfunctional houses had no chance of surviving: publishing was a business, and the fun and excitement of discovering new authors would always compete with the necessity of making a profit.
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- The Cambridge History of American Modernism , pp. 381 - 396Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2023