Publisher's Weekly Review
Blanche Knopf was a full partner in the esteemed publishing company Alfred A. Knopf (named for her husband) from its founding in 1915 until her death in 1966. The case made here by biographer Claridge (Emily Post) is that, of the two partners, Blanche led the more interesting life. Shortly after marrying, Blanche and Alfred settled into a somewhat distant relationship and lived apart much of the time. Their lives revolved around books, with Blanche's many prestigious acquisitions including works by multiple Nobel Prize winners, Khalil Gibran, Dashiell Hammett, Willa Cather, Sigmund Freud, and countless other prominent authors. Claridge recounts Blanche's struggles with depression, intense love of dogs, and affairs with other men. Blanche's marriage was often fraught, but her friendship with writers H.L. Mencken and Carl Van Vechten helped sustain her emotionally. Claridge's storytelling is mostly clear and linear, but she occasionally omits narrative transitions, which can cause confusion for the reader. However, she manages to synthesize an enormous amount of research and biographical information to paint a complete picture of a complex figure. Packed with interesting literary anecdotes, this biography reveals a powerful woman who played an integral role in 20th-century publishing. Agent: Carol Mann, Carol Mann Agency. (Apr.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Although it carries the name Alfred A. Knopf, the prestigious publishing house founded in New York City in 1915 would not exist if it weren't for Blanche Knopf. Claridge (Emily Post, 2008) is the first to bring Blanche Wolf Knopf fully out of the shadows in this meticulous, groundbreaking biography. Blanche and Alfred agreed to be equal partners as publishers, but a shared love of literature did not foster a happy marriage or felicitous working relationship, causing Blanche perpetual anguish as Alfred failed to acknowledge her essential role in the company until her final years. Nonetheless, she persevered, becoming a powerful literary force by virtue of her zeal, acumen, extraordinary prescience, impeccable taste, magnanimous sociability, and stoicism. Buoyed by her close friends and advisers, H. L. Mencken and Carl Van Vechten, Blanche signed epoch-defining writers, including Willa Cather, Thomas Mann, Langston Hughes, Wallace Stevens, Dashiell Hammett, and Raymond Chandler. Blanche knew everyone, loved to party, had many affairs, traveled often to Europe, and crisscrossed South America during WWII, discovering authors and gathering intelligence about Nazi sympathizers for the State Department. Concealing her sorrows and the misogynist injustices she endured, Blanche worked relentlessly, achieved mightily, and ultimately destroyed her health. Claridge illuminates a radiant facet of American publishing and women's history as she portrays Blanche Knopf in all her brainy and aesthetic glory and elegant fortitude.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2016 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
IF YOU'VE EVER struggled with the task of composing a guest list for the ultimate fantasy dinner party, Laura Claridge's biography of Blanche Knopf (née Wolf) will show you whom to put at the head of your table. That dream guest is, of course, Claridge's subject: the petite, intense and, as Robert Gottlieb once put it, "fierce and exigent" co-founder of the great literary publishing house Alfred A. Knopf. She was an intuitive and visionary champion of contemporary authors, a voracious bookworm, a tireless hobnobber, a snappy dresser and a lifelong dog-lover (of tiny, fluffy ones, not of the imposing, austere borzoi she chose to grace the Knopf colophon, a breed she regarded as "cowardly, stupid, disloyal, and full of self-pity"). To round out the notional gathering, you might wheedle the illustrious publisher into bringing along some of her devoted friends, from Thomas Mann, H. L. Mencken, Albert Camus and Muriel Spark to Langston Hughes, John Hersey and Willa Cather. Or you could invite one of her many musical boyfriends, a group that included (but was not limited to) Jascha Heifetz, Leopold Stokowski and Arthur Rubinstein. An added perk: You wouldn't need to worry about entertainment. Her pals Paul Robeson and George Gershwin could be counted on to drop by and provide the music, while Blanche herself (and chums Helen Hayes and Anita Loos) could dance the Charleston, the Lindy Hop and the Black Bottom. In 1925, at one of her dinner parties, Blanche performed a spirited medley of all three while sporting a top hat and cane, prompting her husband and business partner, Alfred, to "applaud vigorously; even as the guests seemed unsure what to think." This, Blanche's biographer makes plain, was a rare instance of spousal approval. The typical tenor of the couple's rapport, Claridge establishes early on, was acrimonious. Indeed, the Knopf conference room seems to have resembled the living room in "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" (published by Knopf in 1962), with Blanche intentionally "nettling" Alfred, provoking him to shout, and Alfred "swooping down on her just as she thought there was an all-clear." And yet the longtime Knopf board member Ralph Colin told an interviewer, "We were always sure Alfred was absolutely crazy about Blanche." How did she feel about him? When she was on the road, she occasionally sent him notes with smiley faces. Claridge weaves them into her textured portrait as proof of the "innumerable swings in the marriage." When the Knopfs were face to face, though, their dynamic was volatile at best. Yet somehow the marriage lasted and their business thrived. What kept them together? It's perhaps more useful to ask what brought them together. Blanche and Alfred, both children of prosperous New York Jewish families, met in the summer of 1911, when she was 17 and he almost 19, at a private club on Long Island's South Shore. They started dating the next year, when Alfred was working as an office boy at Doubleday. Other courting couples speak of love; Alfred Knopf and Blanche Wolf spoke of books, specifically their vision of establishing their own publishing house, hewing to the highest standard. When they founded their company in 1915, Knopf promised his betrothed that her maiden name would be incorporated into the firm's title, that she'd be treated as an equal partner. Following their marriage, in April 1916, he ignored that vow. After Blanche's death, in 1966, he admitted he had never intended to honor it. Their publishing house would remain a one-man show, if only in name. Blanche never forgave this betrayal. Although "infuriated," as Claridge puts it, by her husband's perfidy, Blanche nevertheless remained loyal to their shared vocation, if not to the marriage. (The same was true for her husband.) But as she courted and nurtured the writers who would bring honor to Knopf and Nobel Prizes to themselves, she seethed to watch her husband claim her laurels as his. IN 1921, Claridge reveals, during the couple's first joint author-scouting trip to Europe, made on the heels of their firm's successful fifth anniversary and almost three years after the birth of their only child, Alfred Knopf Jr. (known as Pat), Blanche was so unhappy she attempted suicide while visiting the country home of a British publisher. Claridge speculates that the episode may have "expressed Blanche's despair at having been omitted from the Knopf five-year celebration, an omission that reverberated with industry people she met on this trip." Whether or not this was the proximate cause, the biographer gives ample evidence of Blanche Knopf's keen resentment of her husband's annexation of her achievements. The Knopfs' continual clashes were not, to put it mildly, conducive to marital harmony. Just a few years later, Blanche would tell the Knopf author Carl Van Vechten (a close friend of both Knopfs) that she was "tired of sleeping with Alfred." Very soon, she started taking lovers: some of them eminent, some not; one of them serious (a suave European named Hubert Hohe) and, much later, a strikingly handsome driver and self-described "pimp for the Hollywood crowd" named Scotty Bowers, who also found dates for Alfred (though he thinks neither Knopf knew of his double duty). A butler who worked for both Knopfs noted that while "Alfred was discreet," in Claridge's paraphrase, "it was Blanche he respected." "I admired her as I admired a tiger," the butler added. "She got everything she wanted." The biographer, possessing the fuller record, corrects this misimpression: "She didn't, of course." What was it, one wonders, that made Blanche Knopf, who was so gifted, so insightful, so strong-willed, stay in a marriage that tormented herself and her partner? The British publisher Sir Robert Lusty suggested that "there existed between them a most touching devotion." Could this have been enough? Really, such a conundrum is precisely why you yearn to have Blanche Knopf at the dinner table, so you could ask her yourself . . . if you dared. LIESL SCHILLINGER is a regular contributor to the Book Review.
Kirkus Review
A prestigious publishing house and the strong-willed woman who guided it. In 1911, when 17-year-old Blanche Wolf (1894-1966) met Alfred Knopf, she felt immediately "drawn to his intellectual manner and self-possession." By the time they married in 1916, they had already begun a publishing firm "devoted to high-quality fiction and nonfiction." Biographer and journalist Claridge (Emily Post: Daughter of the Gilded Age, Mistress of American Manners, 2008, etc.) details the firm's development, unfortunately allowing chronology to dominate the narrative. In charge of fiction and poetry, Blanche amassed an estimable list of writers: within a few years, that list included T.S. Eliot, Willa Cather, Robert Graves, Elinor Wylie, Ezra Pound, H.L. Mencken (who became Blanche's confidant), and Carl Van Vechten, who became a close friend and "perfect scout." Through Van Vechten, Blanche connected with, and published, many Harlem Renaissance writers and modernists. Yet despite her ability to lure authors, she found herself "blithely dismissed" and often rudely disdained by Alfred and his overbearing father, who interfered relentlessly in the couple's personal and professional lives. Rather than standing up for his wife, Alfred always "defended to the last the father he chose to remember as always being there for him." Along with documenting Blanche's prowess as a publisher, Claridge diligently chronicles her difficult marriage. Alfred was as obstreperous at home as he was at the officeto her and their only son, Pat. She was so worried about Alfred's nastiness to Pat that she enrolled him in boarding schools, although she herself showed little maternal warmth. Pat said that earning his pilot's wings was the only time his father seemed proud of him. Blanche responded to her marital problems by taking many lovers, including Leopold Stokowski, Jascha Heifetz, and Serge Koussevitsky. A chain smoker and heavy drinker, Blanche ruined her health by dieting to alarming thinness. Nearly blind, she died of cancer in 1966. A straightforward recounting of the difficult life of a woman of discerning literary taste. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Claridge (Emily Post: Daughter of the Gilded Age, Mistress of American Manners) presents a fascinating look at Blanche Knopf (1894-1966), an extraordinarily gifted reader, -editor, and arbiter of literary taste. Married to Alfred A. Knopf (who had promised her equal treatment in the eponymous publishing house, cofounded with her in 1915), she was well known in literary and arts circles in the United States, Europe, and South America but was often overlooked in her husband and father-in-law's quest to build a publishing empire. Until now, her efforts on behalf of literature have long been ignored or relegated to Alfred's shadow.- -VERDICT Filled with insights into the literary intrigues of the times and Blanche's careful handling and promotion of "her" writers as well as the house's authors, this biography is highly recommended to readers who are interested in modernist literature, American -literature, publishing, and creative writing.-Pam -Kingsbury, Univ. of North Alabama, Florence © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.