The modernist presses

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.