New Search

If you are not happy with the results below please do another search

8 search results for: suite for calliope

1

Excited to Receive My Copy of “AMONG FRIENDS: An Illustrated Oral History of American Book Publishing in the 20th Century”

The Story Behind a Handsome New Book on Books

One bright spot during the dark first year of COVID came on October 10, 2020, almost three years ago. I was invited by Buz Teacher to write an essay for a book he was assembling, an oral history of bookselling and publishing in the last century. Buz had asked my publishing friend Mildred Marmur for a contribution to the forthcoming book and she advised him to ask me, too. Given that I’d been writing about writing about both subjects for more than a decade it didn’t take me long say yes.

Fortunately, I had about six months before I would have to deliver my essay. As is my wont when I have a writing assignment that I’m obliged to deliver—this is true for  writing pitch letters as an agent, or when I was an in-house editor in publishing companies and I had dust jacket copy and catalog copy to write—I fretted about it for some time without actually writing anything. I couldn’t think how I might start it. Eventually I did quit procrastinating and found a place to begin.

I handed the essay in, in June 2021, under the title “The Education of a Bookselling Editor,” clocking in at approximately 4100 words. I welcomed the opportunity to write longer than usual; personal essays on this site, like one I published here—about working with William Styron on an Introduction he wrote for Dead Run, a nonfiction narrative I edited about an innocent man on Death Row—tend to less than 2500 words.

I also handed into Buz, and his co-editor, his wife Janet Bukovinsky Teacher, about half a dozen photos and illustrations from Undercover Books, the bookstores I ran with my siblings and our parents at the start of my career,  and from some of the titles I’ve brought out as editor, which they said they hoped to use as they laid the book out. For more than two years, I’ve been wondering which ones they might use. Much time passed, but Buz kept in touch, and I had faith that the design and production of the book, and all that was necessary to make what would ultimately be a 576-page tome—the impressive volume is 9 inches wide, 11 inches tall, with a 3-inch thick spine, and weighs about nine pounds, with dozens of photos and illustrations and essays by more than 100 contributors (many of whom are bookpeople I know)—was well in hand. My confidence wasn’t misplaced—after all, Buz and his late brother Lawrence had co-founded the indie publisher Running Press back in the day.

Contributors were not being offered money as payment, but Buz promised us all a finished copy of the book, which I’m thrilled to say arrived today. This is the book’s website, where there’s a two-minute video trailer. The official publication date is in two days, September 23rd. They edited my piece lightly**, and split it into into two sections; one, headed Independent Booksellers: All in the Family, is devoted to my years as a bookseller with Undercover Books, the bookstore I founded and ran in Cleveland from 1978-85 with my siblings Joel and Pamela, and our parents, Sylvia and Earl; the second, called Literary Independents: Making a Difference, covers roughly my first two decades as an in-house editor and publisher.

As the book copy puts it,

In lively personal essays about the people, companies, and books that helped shape our culture, more than 100 prominent figures and publishing and bookselling recall their careers during a time of extraordinary growth, from the postwar period through the revolutions of the 1960s and ’70s to the new millennium. Illustrated with original photography of vintage book jackets, period graphics form Publishers Weekly and archival photos, Among Friends reveals how the book industry both reflected and responded to societal changes. This deluxe limited edition pays homage to the creative and entrepreneurial spirt of that time.”

If you’re a bibliophile or if you have a book collector on your holiday gift list, I suggest you consider buying this very special book for them. They only printed around 1600 copies, so if this is a book for you, or someone you love, I suggest you not wait to buy it, because it could sell out, and the price of it in future resale is in my opinion likely to rise in years to come beyond it’s published list price of $200.

Below is the complete essay I wrote in 2021, and below it are photos of the handsome book and the hinged box and my contributions to it. It is really a stunning book.

The Education of a Bookselling Editor

Founding Undercover Books

In 1977, while finishing my last year as an undergraduate at Franconia College, an experimental institution in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, I had intended with my bachelor’s degree in history of religion and philosophy of education, to seek a professional niche for myself promoting interfaith dialogue among Jews and gentiles. I hoped to work for an organization with a mission to combat bigotry, anti-Semitism, injustice, and intolerance. After returning to Cleveland, my hometown, I began looking in this direction, but quickly learned that, lacking an advanced degree, I was unlikely to have a chance of getting anywhere in the field. What’s more, as an émigré from traditional education—I had also attended an alternative high school, my first happy immersion in the educational ferment of the times—graduate school was the last thing I wanted to do! I may have only known it inchoately, but I sought a field in which my nontraditional education and interests would not hold me back, and might even propel me forward.

At roughly the same time, my elder siblings, out in the work world longer than I, were already plotting exits of their own from any chance they’d be relegated to humdrum working lives.

Pamela, the eldest of us three, had worked in Cleveland’s grand department stores, which had bustling book departments, and middle sibling Joel (d. 2009) had worked at Kay’s Bookstore, in downtown Cleveland, a venerable book emporium whose truculent owner Rachel Kowan kept her employees on their toes by challenging them to answer exactly where certain titles in the rambling three-floor store were shelved, along with other tests of arcane bookselling knowledge, such as which edition of Goethe’s Faust contained Parts I and II of the frequently abridged work.

Pam and Joel’s smart idea was to open, with our book-loving parents Earl and Sylvia, a new bookstore in Shaker Heights, the suburb where we’d grown up. I quickly tossed my lot in with them, at least to get the store opened, then soon found myself more involved and engaged by bookselling and the book business than I’d anticipated. We chose the name Undercover Books—invoking our passion for reading under the covers as kids, and for mystery fiction—and on May 4, 1978 opened the first of what would ultimately be three locations.

In this collection of essays about bookselling and publishing in the second half of the twentieth century, it is noteworthy that Undercover Books joined the wave of a building trend in the 1970s-80s in which retail bookselling was migrating from department stores and big downtown bookstores to indie bookstores in the suburbs of a number of cities—Pittsburgh, Detroit, Atlanta, St. Louis, Kansas City, as well as in our own downtown, where many local readers had long shopped at Publix Book Mart, run for decades by the eminent Anne and Bob Levine. However, suburbanites with readerly interests not inclined to visit downtown were under-booked, it could be said.

The space we leased in an outdoor strip shopping center—deliberately not an indoor mall—had formerly housed a shoe store where we’d shopped as kids, and was large at 2700 square feet, but the shape itself was that of a shoebox, and could’ve made for a very dull bookstore layout. Smartly though, a store designer showed us how to address this problem: beyond the front section of the store, where the cash counter and walls of bookcases displaying lots of frontlist fiction and nonfiction were displayed face-out, we could cut into the rectangular space with wooden bookcases built at 30-degree angles, lending an intimate, library-like feel to the store. With that, the Travel, Reference, Literature, Poetry, Art & Photography, Children’s, Health & Parenting, and Cookbook sections became their own quiet spaces. The opening of this attractively designed bookstore, in a suburb with a well-educated populace that had never had a bookstore within its city limits, quickly attracted the trade and appreciation of lots and lots of people locally and in the city more widely.

I enjoyed working on in-store displays, and grew adept at fashioning arrangements of books that encouraged browsers to make connections among titles, subjects, authors, and ideas, while also managing to shelve the greatest number of titles possible in finite spaces. As adult book buyer, I ordered books that led to annual sales exceeding $1,000,000, at a time when that level of sales was not common among independent bookstores. Regularly called upon by sales reps, and pitched specific titles by sales management, Undercover Books became a go-to store for publishers eager to break out books nationally. Notable fiction writers who launched books with us included Mark Helprin (A Dove of the East, and Other Stories, Seymour Lawrence/Delacorte Press), Richard North Patterson (The Lasko Tangent, W.W. Norton), and Walter Tevis (Queen’s Gambit, Random House). We also held salon-like evenings, as when George Gibson of David R. Godine, Publisher, discussed the Godine list and fine printing with our customers.

We’d look for books we had already read and enjoyed, new or backlist, on which we would take aggressive ordering positions, then sell 300-400 copies of these titles in a two- or three-month stretch. This happened with Simon & Schuster’s trade paperback reissue of Jack Finney’s classic time travel novel Time & Again, as it did with the travelogue Blue Highways, when author William Least Moon was brought in by our Little, Brown rep to meet us and sign stacks of the hardcover we had ordered. Our parents were also avid readers, Sylvia of commercial fiction and cookbooks, Earl of biography, sports and business, and their enthusiasms meant our in-store selection appealed to a wide age range of readers. Our parents also opened their home for meals and convivial time with sales reps and authors.

Cleveland was the home of many Fortune 500 companies, and most had corporate libraries in their home offices, where professional books were often required, likewise true of partners in remote offices who also needed books for their work. We worked with staff librarians who got requests for books for the home office and from distant branches, all of which business we’d fulfill. We made rapid delivery of special orders and prompt service on bulk orders of business books, reference titles, and professional manuals a priority. Innovations we made in book ordering and inventory management, in conjunction with book industry expert Leonard Shatzkin and his son Mike, a publishing consultant, made Undercover Books the subject of a chapter in Leonard’s diagnosis of the book business, In Cold Type: Overcoming the Book Crisis (Houghton Mifflin, 1982) and of articles in Publishers Weekly.

In this period, Joel became a board member of the American Booksellers Association (ABA), which gave us a voice in independent bookselling’s response to the growing influence of corporate chain bookselling. Able to start a conversation with just about anyone, Joel enjoyed public organizing and in 2000 ran for the House of Representatives in Ohio’s 11th congressional district. That same year, Pamela was hired by Overdrive, an early distributor of ebooks. With responsibility to uphold copyright, publishers wanted assurance that their titles would be secure on the emerging platforms. As director of content, she worked to gain the confidence of sales and marketing departments, holding that position till 2004, a key period in the digital transition.

During my time in bookselling I read avidly in all genres of fiction, especially many detective series and spy fiction, enjoying and recommending books by George Chesbro, James Crumley, Earl W. Emerson, Dorothy Hughes, Margaret Millar, Russell Greenan, John Le Carré, Tony Hillerman, Ross Macdonald and John D. Macdonald. We also had great clientele for new literary fiction, selling many copies of books by Robert Stone, Brian Moore, Peter De Vries, Anne Tyler, Barbara Pym, Margery Sharp, Margaret Atwood, Laurie Colwin, Howard Frank Mosher, Ernest Hebert, and Susan Richards Shreve.

It should be noted too that we opened just as a new generation of Canadian authors was bursting in to print, and I had an instant affinity for Canadian literature. Though trade rules at the time discouraged importation of Canadian titles, I found a way to work around them. Seal Books was Bantam Books’ Canadian division; their titles resided ostensibly off-limits to us on an out-of-the-way corner of the Bantam order form. Our Bantam rep instructed me if I ordered any Seal Books titles the order wouldn’t be filled, but I penciled in some quantities to see what would happen, and they were shipped to us! We began introducing our customers to books by Margaret Atwood, Mordecai Richler, Margaret Laurence, Marian Engel, Antonine Maillet, Alice Munro, Guy Vanderhaeghe, Timothy Findley, Farley Mowat, Pierre Berton, the longtime CBC broadcaster Patrick Watson, who visited our store to launch his suspense novel, Alter Ego (Viking, 1979), and Robertson Davies.

We were ordering Davies’ Deptford Trilogy (Fifth Business, Manticore, World of Wonders) by the carton from Penguin, stacking them up and selling them in large quantities. In my enthusiasm, I wrote Davies a letter c/o of Penguin to explain this and let him know about our stores. A pleasant correspondence ensued between us, his letters from which are reproduced in facsimile form here.

In 1982 Davies’ editor at Viking, Elisabeth Sifton, invited me to write a letter to U.S. booksellers extolling his work and pitching them on his new novel, The Rebel Angels, which became the Canadian author’s first U.S. hardcover bestseller.

The bookstore was graduate school for me. After seven years, I felt the proverbial itch and decided I’d like to try working in publishing, preferably as an editor. I was keen to originate books, not just sell them as finished products, and with the bookstore experience, I was hopeful I could get a job and do meaningful work. In 1985, I embarked for New York City and bearing in mind E.B. White’s observation in his essay “Here is New York” that, “No one should come to New York to live unless he is willing to be lucky,” I found an apartment in Washington Heights, the hilliest section of Manhattan with its bike-able hills and steep stairways, and the dramatic George Washington Bridge in view from many vantage points, endowing me with a fondness for bridges that lasts to this day as evidenced by the name of my book-focused blog, The Great Gray Bridge, an homage to the 1942 childrens classic The Little Red Lighthouse and The Great Gray Bridge.
Following my departure from Cleveland, the family continued operating from the original location, and then in 1992, to capitalize on the strong B2B elements in the business, Joel re-envisioned the business as Undercover Book Service, supplying books to individuals and corporations all over the country and abroad. With the emergence of the Internet in 1993, the family transformed the stores into an online book-ordering service powered by a website they created some months before Amazon got underway.

Turning 7 Years of Bookstore Experience into a Publishing Career 

One of the first publishing houses I applied to was Charles Scribner’s Sons, as the firm now called Scribner was then known. A contributor to this volume, Mildred Marmur, was its president then, the first female head of a major house. Though we’d never met, she saw me in her office. Intrigued by my background, she explained she had nothing full-time to offer me, but added that the company was sponsoring a first novel contest named after Maxwell Perkins, the legendary Scribner editor who’d nurtured the talents of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Thomas Wolfe, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, and James Jones. She asked if I’d want to work as the contest’s first reader. I told her that at Undercover Books we’d sold A. Scott Berg’s biography, Maxwell Perkins: Editor of Genius (Dutton, 1978), so would be pleased with the opportunity to tap into Perkins’ literary legacy.

More recently, it must be said that as I’ve been preparing this essay for print, I’ve learned about a different legacy of Perkins’ that does not shine favorably on him or Scribner: his shameful elevation of eugenics through their book list, a revelation from author Daniel Okrent that has led to an overdue re-assessment of the Scribner editor’s reputation by many, including the editor of Penguin Random House’s One World book imprint, Chris Jackson, the 2020 recipient of an award formerly given in Perkins’ name. To me, this shows that our business should never be satisfied with its past, but in concert with the wider society, must always work toward a better future for all.

Working three days per week in what ended up as a two-month stint in the winter of 1986, I ensconced myself in Scribner’s conference room with unopened jiffy bags and manuscripts stacked up around me like so much drying cordwood. Think John Updike’s classic sketch “Invasion of the Book Envelopes.” My assignment was to unpack the mailers and read between 5-50 pages of each manuscript of what turned out to be more than 700 contest entries. I also filled out a brief questionnaire, signaling a thumbs-down or -up for a second reading by senior editors. Coincidentally, I recommended seventy entries, or almost exactly 10%, for second readings. There was one entry I really loved, by an E.M. Hunnicutt, which I read avidly beyond the allotted limit. My recommendation of it was more enthusiastic than for any other candidate, but before I’d finished plowing through all the entries, I saw that it wasn’t going to win the prize. I noted the author’s phone number and address and photocopied the manuscript, hoping I might contact “Hunnicutt” soon, once I was hired somewhere as a full-fledged editor.

My good luck held and soon, after a reference from literary agent Ruth Nathan (wife of longtime Publishers Weekly subsidiary rights reporter Paul Nathan), I was offered a job as an acquiring editor at Walker & Company, a somewhat sleepy publisher of young adult non-fiction and genre adult fiction (Westerns, mysteries, Regency romances, etc.), published mostly for libraries. Walker had terraced offices with scenic views twelve storeys above Fifth Avenue at 56th Street; on St. Patrick’s Day the company threw parties as the annual parade streamed past below, attended by house authors such as Isaac Asimov. I was assigned the genre that founder and publisher Sam Walker called “men’s adventure”–thrillers, swashbucklers, seafaring novels, spy books, a genre I still enjoy. Walker had in its early years published books by John Le Carré and Flann O’Brien, so I was hopeful that my mandate might extend to other areas of publishing, even literary fiction. My first week at Walker I called E.M. Hunnicutt—whose initials made me think of E.M. Forster—and learned that E.M.’s first name was “Ellen.” She explained that because she sold many stories to Boys’ Life, the magazine of Boy Scouts of America, she’d long used the initials to disguise her gender,

Ellen and I hit it off beautifully and for an advance of $750 I acquired rights to her novel, the first novel I line-edited. Our relationship established a high benchmark in my relationships with authors that I’ve always sought out since. Ellen and I engaged in a vigorous dialogue about her work and its dominant theme—the creative purposes to which suffering and mourning may be put. The protagonist of the novel was Ada Cunningham a young teenage girl and musical prodigy who’d fled a destructive custody battle that engulfed her family in the wake of her mother’s death. She narrates her story from a safe haven she’s found with a circus troupe that’s wintering over in a quiet Florida camp where she finds solace in composing a requiem for her late mom on the troupe’s calliope.

When Suite for Calliope: A Novel of Music and the Circus, was published in the spring of 1987, it received a starred review in Kirkus, Dell bought paperback rights, and Walker sold out its hardcover first printing. The starred Kirkus happened to land on my desk on May 4, long a fateful date on my personal calendar for the opening of Undercover Books and other milestones. I phoned Ellen to give her the good news and read the review to her, learning only then that that day was her birthday. Suffice it to say, it was one of the happiest birthday calls I’ve ever made. Ellen’s run of good fortune wasn’t finished yet: Before her novel went to the printer, she learned that for her short fiction she’d won the Drue Heinz Literature Prize. This was an award associated with the literary journal Antaeus, which editor Daniel Halpern co-founded with Paul Bowles, a laurel we were able to print on the book jacket; the senior judge of the Heinz Prize that year was Nadine Gordimer. Her winning collection, In the Music Library, was also published in 1987, by Pittsburgh University Press. Quite a year for Ellen. Working with her was a great privilege and cemented my ardent interest in modern nomads and circus stories.

I’ll add that Ellen Hunnicutt’s novel played a role in cementing my relationship with my wife, artist Kyle Gallup, whom I would meet and marry in 1990-91, only a few years after the novel had come out.

Another novelist of Ellen’s period, Mark Dintenfass, praised her novel in a blurb he gave me for the jacket, commenting that the novel “teaches the reader how to read it, with its discussions of art, psychology, and philosophy being clues to its own design.” When Kyle and I met our conversations quickly took on an aesthetic and literary dimension, and I hoped she might appreciate the book as I had. I sent her a copy. When we discussed it she told me that she really liked the narrator Ada—and her friend in the story, a female painter named Kyle—and I knew for sure we could share many things.

Eyewitnesses to History

While Senior Editor and Editor-in-Chief of Kodansha America from 1992-97, I endorsed the recommendation of editorial colleague Deborah Baker who proposed we acquire trade paperback rights from Times Books/Random House to then-Illinois State Senator Barack Obama’s family memoir Dreams From My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance, which we published in 1996 as a title in the Kodansha Globe series, a nonfiction trade paperback program that paved the way for such successful series as NYRB Classics. At Kodansha I also worked with the prolific diarist and octogenarian Edward Robb Ellis, establishing an affinity in me for editing epistolary works. When his magnum opus, A Diary of the Century: Tales from America’s Greatest Diarist, was published in October 1995, though exclusive arrangements usually applied with the TV network morning shows, Ellis achieved the rare hat trick of being interviewed by Cokie Roberts on ABC, Katie Couric on NBC, and Harry Smith on CBS on their respective morning shows.

By coincidence, my next job was Executive Editor for Times Books/Random House, from 1997-2000. Newly ensconced there, I was submitted a manuscript that I knew would shock the conscience of readers, the true story of an innocent man on Virginia’s Death Row. The heart of the book was the diary of the inmate, which co-authors Joe Jackson and William Burke used skillfully in building their powerful narrative, with first-person diary entries laced through their prose. It was submitted to me during a hot summer, and when the authors chronicled the suffocatingly sultry conditions in the prison, it all but sparked a raging fever in me. With my reaction, it struck me that William Styron, a son of Virginia whose social justice advocacy included vocal opposition to capital punishment, would be outraged at the rank injustice. Through Styron’s Random House editor Robert Loomis, I got the manuscript to “Bill,” as Loomis called him, and began a dialogue with the novelist who offered to write an Introduction to the book, DEAD RUN: The Shocking Story of Dennis Stockton and Life on Death Row in America. 

When I received the draft of his essay, I noted that it revealed the ultimate fate of the inmate Stockton, something I had thought we might not let slip. I called Styron, and suggested that we might refrain from doing this, to which he responded, “The specter of doom hangs over Mr. Stockton from the manuscript’s first page.” I realized he was correct, and forswore my original intention. Styron’s eloquent Introduction shone a bright light on the miscarriage of justice in the book.

As a person, I am not overly concerned about what people seem to think of me, nor do I crave lots of personal validation from others. Yet it’s an occupational hazard of the book business; as an editor and advocate for books, one is invariably focused on what people think of your titles—by publishing house colleagues, and among booksellers, sales reps, agents, foreign scouts, critics, and readers. My aspirations for my books are often sustained by blurbs, reviews, and word-of-mouth, or deflated by the lack of them. In the case of Dead Run, I was blessed by the enthusiasm of Loomis and Styron, which nourished my hopes for the book with such ardency that I was inspired to mint a quip I’m still fond of sharing about my profession: “Being an editor allows me to express my latent religiosity, since I spend so much time praying for my books.”

 At Times Books, I continued working with authors of advanced age, publishing EXODUS 1947: The Ship that Launched a Nation by the trailblazing photojournalist Ruth Gruber (1911-2016), who following the Holocaust had covered the voyage of the real-life Exodus ship and became the foremost chronicler of displaced persons (DPs) in Europe during the postwar years.

As Editor-in-Chief with Carroll & Graf from 2000-2006, I edited and published THE REVENANT, an historical novel and wilderness survival tale that was the first book I acquired after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, when colleagues and I fled from our offices just blocks from the World Trade Center; though novels don’t usually carry subtitles, I suggested to author Michael Punke that he append a tag line to his book which to this day is known as A Novel of Revenge. Other books of mine during this period included national bestseller THE POLITICS OF TRUTH: Inside the Lies that Put the White House on Trial and Betrayed My Wife’s CIA Identity (2004) by Ambassador Joseph Wilson, who upon his death in 2019 was still a hero to many for his vocal opposition to the 2003 invasion of Iraq; THE BABY THIEF: The Untold Story of Georgia Tann, the Baby Seller Who Corrupted Adoption (2007) by Barbara Bisantz Raymond, an exposé of a nefarious baby broker, a Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year; and the cri-de-coeur SHAKE HANDS WITH THE DEVIL: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda by Lt. Gen. Roméo Dallaire, commander of the U.N. peacekeeping force during the genocide in Rwanda. As Editorial Director of Union Square Press at Sterling Publishing, in 2008 I published COVERT: My Years Infiltrating the Mob by NBA referee Bob Delaney with Dave Scheiber, a USA TODAY Best Book of the Year, a memoir of the author’s three-year high-wire undercover stint investigating organized crime.

The above books all shared a common feature: They were written by and/or about singular witnesses to history–insiders, whistleblowers, truthtellers, muckrakers, revisionist historians–people who’d passed through a crucible of experience that left them with elevated authority in the eyes of the reading public, and the only person who could write the book in question, or about whom it could be written. Whether told in the first person by an author whose personal experience leaves them uniquely qualified to tell the tale, or in the third person by a reporter or scholar who has pursued a story or historical episode with single-minded passion, I remain devoted to working with authors like these, publishing imperative books that really matter in people’s lives.

I am enormously grateful for the opportunity to have worked in my family’s bookstores, and in publishing with eight different in-house jobs, and still be working in the book business, now independently for more than a decade. My experimental education turned out to be no hindrance at all, but an ideal prelude. The work has rarely been humdrum, but instead a continually stimulating, collegial, and rewarding field. While not working in the profession I had in college imagined for myself, many of the books I’ve worked on have been expressions of the search for social justice that fueled my education. I’m happy to close by noting that the familial nature of my endeavors continues with the advent in January 2020 of my adult son Ewan Turner as Executive Editor of the editorial consultancy and literary agency I now operate.

**Alas, the light editing that was done seems to have led to the excision of the lines just above, “I’m happy to close by noting that the familial nature of my endeavors continues with the advent in January 2020 of my adult son Ewan Turner working as Executive Editor of the editorial consultancy and literary agency I now operate.” I suppose this was because it was the last line in the whole piece and the layout was bumping up against the bottom of the page. That’s why I’m happy that I have this website, so I can run every word of the original text here, and with all the Internet links I had included in it, anticipating some day publishing the entire essay on this blog (and in the event there was a digital edition of the book). It’s also given me the opportunity to write the Introduction to it above, and offer all the context that I have above in the “The Story Behind a Handsome New Book on Books.”

[gallery link="file" ids="18170,18171,18172,18173,18174,18175,18176,18177,18178"]

 

[gallery link="file" ids="18183,18184,18186,18187,18189,18185,18188"]

 

2

Remembering Drue Heinz—Prolific Cultural Benefactor—and Ellen Hunnicutt, Novelist of Music and the Circus

I discovered Ellen Hunnicutt and her novel in my first publishing job, a six-week stint I did at Scribner Publishing as first reader/contest judge for the Maxwell Perkins Prize, named in honor of the house’s venerable editor of many important writers including F. Scott Fitzgerald, Thomas Wolfe, and Ernest Hemingway. Mildred Marmur, Scribner’s publisher at the time, then and since a great friend to me and many other publishing people, gave me what became my first break in publishing. I’d been referred to her to inquire about a full-time editorial job; I made an appointment, went to see her and introduced myself, explaining I’d worked in my family’s bookstore business for seven years, and wanted to become an editor. She said she had no full-time editorial positions open, but there was the Perkins contest to judge, and a conference room full of mailed submissions awaiting the attentions of a first reader. As a bookseller I’d read and sold A. Scott Berg’s Maxwell Perkins: Editor of Genius and was thrilled with the job. Working three days each week, I sat in Scribner’s conference room with jiffy bags and manuscripts stacked up around me like drying cord wood. My assignment was to unpack all these mailers and read between 5-50 pages of each entry, fill out a brief questionnaire, and signal a thumbs-down or -up for a possible second reading by the full-time editorial staff. Coincidentally, I recommended 70 entries, or 10%, for second readings. There was one entry I really loved, by a writer called E.M. Hunnicutt, for which I eagerly read far more than the 50 pages. My recommendation of it was more enthusiastic than for any other candidate, but it didn’t win the prize. Before finishing the job, I wrote down the author’s phone number and made a copy of the manuscript.

With this first stretch in the ink mines under my belt, I did soon get my first full-time editorial job, at Walker & Company, then a sleepy publisher of young adult non-fiction and genre fiction (Westerns, mysteries, Regency romances, etc.), published mostly for libraries. My genre was to be “men’s adventure.” Still, Walker had in its early years published books by John Le Carre and Flann O’Brien, so I was hopeful that I wouldn’t only be acquiring the male equivalent of bodice-rippers. My first week at Walker I called the E.M.-initialed author and soon found myself talking with “Ellen” Hunnicutt. She told me she’d long used the initials to disguise her gender, since she had sold many stories to Boys’ Life over the years. I told her how much I had liked reading her draft manuscript, with its compelling narrator, Ada, an adolescent girl and musical prodigy who’s fled a bizarre custody battle that engulfed her family in the wake of her mother’s death. She’s sought safe harbor amid a circus troupe that’s wintering over in a quiet Florida camp and found solace in composing a requiem for her late mom on the troupe’s calliope. Ellen and I hit it off beautifully and her novel became the first original manuscript I ever acquired. Over the year that followed, Ellen and I engaged in a vigorous dialogue about her novel and its theme–the creative purposes to which suffering and mourning may be put. In the course of my editing and her revising, Ellen became reinvigorated with her own book, which she’d earlier thought she’d finished. In the course of the edit, she told me about other circus and carny writers, like Jim Tully, whose his 1927 book, Circus Parade she praised for its unsentimental portrait of the raffish big-top life, which influenced her work. She explained she’d read many of Tully’s books early in her life and that his fiction and nonfiction chronicles of hobo life, circus characters, and the down-and-out of the Great Depression had still been widely read when she was a young woman.

For the record, I should add that before Suite for Calliope was published in July of 1987 it received a starred review in Kirkus*; later, Dell bought the paperback rights, and Walker sold out its first hardcover printing. The starred Kirkus happened to land on my desk on May 4, a fateful date on my perpetual calendar: the anniversary of the shootings at Kent State in 1970, the date that Undercover Books opened for business in 1978, and Ellen Hunnicutt’s birthday, which I didn’t even know when I phoned her with the news and read it to her, in this time before fax machines were common, affording me the opportunity to place one of the happiest birthday calls I’ve ever made. And then, before the novel went to the printer, Ellen was notified she’d won the Drue Heinz Literature Prize for her short fiction, described in the Facebook post above, and that the senior judge for the award had been Nadine Gordimer, who wrote in her citation: “Ellen Hunnicutt is adventurous… and her images are splendidly suggestive….Witty stories, jubilantly told.”

Working with Ellen was a great privilege and affirmed my ardent interest in modern nomads and the circus life. For a 2004 Carroll & Graf anthology, Step Right Up: Stories of Carnivals, Sideshows, and the Circus, my editorial colleague who made the selections, Nate Knaebel, smartly chose to include a chapter from Suite for Calliope, which he wrote “describes the anticipation of opening day at an Indiana circus, and a near tragedy averted by the power of music.” Nate also included “With Folded Hands Forever,” a dark passage from Tully’s Circus Parade.

Ellen kept writing in the years that followed, and we remained in touch. However, I’m sad to report that the two books Ellen published in 1987 would be the only books she published in her lifetime, which came to an untimely end in 2003. She was 72. If you’re intrigued by the themes and motifs of her work, I urge you to seek out her books. As for Drue Heinz, the obit from the Pittsburgh Press-Gazette is linked to here.  http://www.post-gazette.com/news/obituaries/2018/03/30/Drue-Heinz-former-publisher-of-The-Paris-Review-dies-at-103/stories/201803300124

The starred Kirkus review of Suite for Calliope:
“An extraordinary first novel that, in its remarkable inventiveness, intelligence, and charm-struck humanity, should draw—and more than richly reward—readers of almost every inclination. Ada Cunningham, of Richmount, Indiana is the partly crippled daughter of gifted and highly eccentric parents: a journalist mother who declares Ada to be a prodigy, raises her as such (with flamboyant elan), then dies suddenly when her daughter is eight years old; and a father who is a musical genius, who came from poverty and was a transient violinist and artful dodger as a child, who gives Ada music lessons from the time she’s three, and who is committed to an asylum before she is 16. Life with these parents–as described by the brave, unflinching, quick, forgiving, and heartwrenchingly observant Ada–would be matter enough for many a novel, but this one soars on toward farther ends that keep the reader wide-eyed and enthralled. There’s a penetrating mystery at the heart of it all, and, before its solution: an aunt who comes into the picture with malevolent aims (she may even want to murder Ada), a burned house, legal proceedings–as result of all of which Ada, accused of being both a witch and a madwoman, flees Richmount and takes to the road (as her father did before her), supporting herself by her wits and by her gifted piano playing (in brothels and bars), until at last she finds sanctuary and refuge in the winter quarters of a circus troupe–with setting, color, and cast of characters worthy of yet another novel–where she becomes (and remains) calliope player, composer, and loved member of this wondrous new “family.” A summary leaves out far too much: the sturdy grace of Ada’s never-self-pitying voice; the continual feast of homely detail, and detail of music, musicians, and musical instruments, as weft as of the circus and its people; and the breathtaking symbolic depth of the whole, which, touched by the hand of this gifted writer, serves to place Ada’s birth, her flight, and her high artist’s quest among very august novelistic company indeed. A prodigiously masterful novel of profundity, breadth, and continual delight: waiting now only for what ought to be its very, very many readers.”

3

Saluting Daniel Halpern, Venerable Champion of Fiction Writers

April 2 2018 Update:

—-
June 4, 2015

I was delighted to see Publishers Weekly reporting this afternoon that Daniel Halpern of Ecco Press is being awarded The Center for Fiction‘s annual #MaxwellPerkinsPrize for “championing writers of fiction in the United States.” I met Dan in 1987, when his stewardship at the literary magazine Antaeus brought us in to contact. The author of a book I’d edited and published, Suite for Calliope: A Novel of Music and the Circus, won the Drue Heinz Literary Prize, an award sponsored by Antaeus—a literary magazine underwritten by cultural benefactor extraordinaire Drue Heinz and edited by Dan Halpern—for a distinguished body of work in short fiction.

Ironically, I had earlier encountered the circus novel, by an as-yet unpublished writer known to me at first as E.M. Hunnicutt, when I worked as first reader/contest judge at Scribner, who in the 1980s  sponsored a first novel prize in Max Perkins’s illustrious name*. Mildred Marmur, then Scribner’s president and publisher, gave me my first job in publishing, following my seven years as a bookseller.

In the Scribner job, working three days every week for six weeks, my brief was to read between 5-50 pages of the more than 700 contest entries, filling out a questionnaire for each one, and recommending those I believed merited second readings. Hunnicutt’s novel was among the 70 or so I recommended (it fascinated me at the time that the number I urged for second readings was practically speaking 10% of the total. By happenstance, I wondered, or some kind of talent factor?

Hunnicutt’s manuscript was among the talented tenth I recommended for second readings, though just before job ended, I learned it wouldn’t advance further in judging. Bouyed my enjoyment of the 100 pages I had gone ahead and read, so I photocopied the title pages of the ms with the author’s contact info. A few weeks later, I got my first full-time job as an acquiring editor, at Walker & Company, I contacted Hunnicutt, who turned out to be Ellen Hunnicutt, and made her novel my first-ever fiction acquisition. Ellen had long gone by E.M. to elide her gender when submitting work to publications such as Boys’ Life. Upon my acquisition of the novel, Ellen made it clear she would now be using her proper name. Some months later, with the novel edited and in galleys, Ellen learned she was recipient of the aforementioned prize named for Drue Heinz, who I wrote about when she died in April 2018. The lead juror for the Drue Heinz Literature Prize in 1987 was Nadine Gordimer, the great South African writer, and resolute anti-apartheid campaigner. Ellen and I were very excited as her first novel headed toward publication in July that year, preceding by a few months a collection of the honored short fiction. A few months later, in an arrangement Anteus had with the University of Pittsburgh Press, Hunnicutt’s short fiction appeared as In the Music Library.

One day, back when Suite For Calliope was still in galleys,  I received a printout of a starred review it got in Kirkus. The date was May 4th, and this was the review, written I learned later by Kirkus’s fiction editor at the time, Ann Larson:

An extraordinary first novel that, in its remarkable inventiveness, intelligence, and charm-struck humanity, should draw–and more than richly reward–readers of almost every inclination. Ada Cunningham, of Richmount, Indiana. is the partly crippled daughter of gifted and highly eccentric parents: a journalist mother who declares Ada to be a prodigy, raises her as such (with flamboyant Élan), then dies suddenly when her daughter is eight years old; and a father who is a musical genius, who came from poverty and was a transient violinist and artful dodger as a child, who gives Ada music lessons from the time she’s three, and who is committed to an asylum before she is 16. Life with these parents–as described by the brave, unflinching, quick, forgiving, and heartwrenchingly observant Ada–would be matter enough for many a novel, but this one soars on toward farther ends that keep the reader wide-eyed and enthralled. There’s a penetrating mystery at the heart of it all, and, before its solution: an aunt who comes into the picture with malevolent aims (she may even want to murder Ada), a burned house, legal proceedings–as result of all of which Ada, accused of being both a witch and a madwoman, flees Richmount and takes to the road (as her father did before her), supporting herself by her wits and by her gifted piano playing (in brothels and bars), until at last she finds sanctuary and refuge in the winter quarters of a circus troupe–with setting, color, and cast of characters worthy of yet another novel–where she becomes (and remains) calliope player, composer, and loved member of this wondrous new “”family.”” A summary leaves out far too much: the sturdy grace of Ada’s never-self-pitying voice; the continual feast of homely detail, and detail of music, musicians, and musical instruments, as weft as of the circus and its people; and the breathtaking symbolic depth of the whole, which, touched by the hand of this gifted writer, serves to place Ada’s birth, her flight, and her high artist’s quest among very august novelistic company indeed. A prodigiously masterful novel of profundity, breadth, and continual delight: waiting now only for what ought to be its very, very many readers.

As I learned when I called to tell Ellen the good news that her novel had received a star from the always tough Kirkus, and read the review to her (this was probably before regular use of fax machines.), I learned it was also her  birthday. We had quite a celebration on the phone. (May 4th has been a meaningful date in my life on a few occasions, recollections about which I’ve  collected in this post.)

When published by Walker, Suite for Calliope sold out its hardcover printing, Dell acquired the paperback rights, and it had a number of laudatory newspaper reviews. Ellen did readings in Wisconsin, near her home—Wisconsin also being the home of the notable circus museum in the town called Baraboo. Years later, when I was working at Kodansha America, and doing a few books in Buddhism, I happened to be reading the Buddhist journal, Tricycle. I came upon an interview with retired New York Knick player and NBA head coach Phil Jackson who praised Suite for Calliope as a meditative novel of ideas that he was currently recommending to friends. All in all, it was a great experience to have with the first novel I ever worked on, made all the better by Drue Heinz and Dan Halpern’s generosity toward the author. We all met in Pittsburgh in the early Spring of 1987, when Ellen received the award for her short stories. To me, it is truly fitting that Dan will receive the later iteration of the Maxwell Perkins Prize. I look forward to congratulating him in person.

To broaden the connections to my professional life even further, and take them all the way back to my roots in bookselling, when I ran Undercover Books, my bookstores in Cleveland, one of the first successful literary books we read and sold was A. Scott Berg’s biography, Maxwell Perkins: Editor of Genius, more recently a popular movie with Colin Firth as the Scribner’s Editor-in-Chief, and Jude Law as Thomas Wolfe.

* As Editor-in-Chief of Scribner in the 1920s-40s, Perkins edited and published novels by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Thomas Wolfe, and Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, among many acclaimed authors.

4

#FridayReads, Feb 7–Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer’s Novel “All the Broken Things”

Monday Feb 10 Update: Wow, I loved All the Broken Things, Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer’s exquisite novel. Such a rich story of an orphaned boy, his sister, and the carny world of bears and barkers that both assaults them and supports them. They weather all that is arrayed against them. I give this extraordinary novel my highest personal recommendation.

All the Broken Things
#FridayReads, Feb 7–Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer’s novel All the Broken Things. This is an amazing and compelling novel set in Toronto in the early 1980s, about a Vietnamese immigrant family of three, former boat people–mother Rose, teenage son Bo, 4-year old daughter Orange Blossom, known as Orange, who was born with profound birth defects owing to Rose’s exposure to the Agent Orange that the US used to defoliate the countryside during the war. The killing chemical was manufactured in Ontario, a factual point that Kuitenbrouwer makes in an Author’s Note. I’ve found the writing in this so good, the sheer sentence-making and storytelling, that though I had read terrific reviews of the novel, prompting me to to order a copy, when it arrived I was expecting to only glance at the opening page and then put it aside until a moment when I thought I would have more time for it. Suffice to say, I didn’t put it aside at all, and now a day later, I’m on page 134. The book is commanding my attention, drawing me in, like the wrestling bear does Bo, the teenage boy of the tale, who willingly folds himself into the animal’s embrace.

Bo is the is fulcrum of the tale. He, far better than Rose, is able to handle Orange and comfort her. But he’s having a very hard time in middle school, picked on by a kid who yells ethnic slurs at him and wants to fight. Bo obliges this kid, and acquits himself well in their after-school battles. One of these scrums is observed by a carnival promoter who thinks Bo may be able to help out in his sideshow that features a bear, Loralei, who is trained to wrestle people. The Author’s Note also make the point that bear wrestling was at one time legal in Ontario, even common on the carny circuit. Just as Bo has an uncommonly intuitive way with his sister, he also has a gift with bears. Kuitenbrouwer’s descriptions of the tactile and empathic relationship between boy and bear could be outlandish, but instead are wholly believable. This is the book’s first paragraph:

“1984, BEAR
Look at the bear licking Bo’s toes up through the metal slats on the back porch. Bo is fourteen years old, and the bear not a year. The bear is named Bear. When the boy spreads his toes as wide as he can, Bear’s mottled tongue nudges in between them and this tickles. Bear craves the vanilla soft ice cream that drips down Bo’s cone and onto his feet. Bo imagines it must be glorious for Bear to huddle under the porch–her favourite spot–and lap and lick up the sweet cold treat. He imagines himself tucked in down there pretending to be a bear, and then how wonderful it might be, after a day alone, to have someone drip vanilla ice cream right into this mouth.” 

From Robertson Davies’ Fifth Business to Ellen Hunnicutt’s Suite for Calliope: A Novel of Music and the Circus, a book I edited and published, to W.C. Fields’ 1939 film “You Can’t Cheat an Honest Man,” I have long had an affinity for carny stories, and All the Broken Things belongs in that good company. I want to know what happens next for Bo and his fragile family, and will be spending much of the next few days finding out. Writer Jonathan Bennet has also discovered the charms of this book, in a great appreciation here
All the Broken Things
[Cross-posted on my blog Honourary Canadian.

5

May 4th, a Key Date in My Life at 3 Critical Junctures

May 4, 2018—On this date forty years ago, I opened Undercover Books in Cleveland with my sister Pamela, brother Joel, and our parents Earl and Sylvia. Below is one of my favorite posts I’ve ever written and shared from this blog about this date in my life.
—–

I published a version of this post on May 4, 2012, and have now updated it for 2013-14 with additional material, such as Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young’s “Ohio,” as you’ll see below. The comments below are from the 2012-13 posting–you’re welcome to add your own.

May 4, a big date on my personal calendar

On this date in 1970 I was fifteen. That afternoon, around 4:30, I was standing on a sidewalk in downtown Cleveland, waiting for my sister Pamela to get off her job at Halle Bros., a local department store. Nearby, a delivery van pulled up, with the name of the evening paper, Cleveland Press, emblazoned across its side. The back door of the van rolled up and a worker began tossing bundles of that afternoon’s edition off the truck. It was a real “Front Page” moment, as in old movies when a swirl of numbered calendar pages and newspaper print resolves in to a splashy headline of bold, readable type and a brash reporter rushes off to get the rest of the story. Only this time, it was not a funny, Capraesque moment. In weirdly unfolding slow-motion I watched a particular bundle roll toward me until it landed above the fold, headline up. Like seeing a license plate in front of one’s eyes during a car accident—and remembering the combo of digits and letters forever—I read the inches-high black type: Four Students Shot Dead On Kent Campus. For several days prior, I had been following the antiwar demonstrations at Kent State, about thirty miles from Cleveland, and I knew that Ohio Governor James Rhodes had deployed armed troops to the campus. Pam soon joined me on the sidewalk and I told her the disturbing news. We shared our shock and dismay and probably dropped whatever we had been planning to do, though I have no memory after telling her about the newspaper headline. I recall that little more than a week later I heard on local radio Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young’s recording of “Ohio.” It was as if Neil had written a musical version of an instant book, as is still done in the book world after a terrible catastrophe. In fact, in Neil’s recent memoir Heavy Peace he recalls quickly writing the song and the alacrity with which they recorded it, pushing the acetate copies of the song out to radio stations, before the vinyl 45s had even been pressed. Here’s a youtube version of the song from the Neil Young online archive. Thanks to Neil for making this sharable, as other versions of the song are not.

https://youtu.be/hxl9R_2ax-8

Eight years later, May 4, 1978

Pamela, our brother Joel, our parents Earl and Sylvia, and I all opened Undercover Books, the bookstore that would define our lives for many years. When I was graduated from Franconia College a year earlier, with a BA in Philosophy of Education and History of Religion, I had imagined I might work for the Anti-Defamation League or some similar organization. I certainly hadn’t thought of working in a bookstore, but my siblings—with Pam having worked in department stores, and Joel at Kay’s Bookstore in downtown Cleveland–had the idea of opening a bookstore in our home suburb of Shaker Heights, where despite it being an affluent and well-educated community, no bookstore had ever been located. We were fortunate in our timing, for in Cleveland, as in several other midwestern cities, book retailing was migrating from the downtown core to the suburbs. Undercover Books caught on right away, and I got what amounted to a graduate education, provided by bookselling. As buyer for adult books for what would become our three-store indie chain, I met every day with bookbuying customers and browsers. We were regularly called upon by publishers’ sales reps, and became a go-to store for houses eager to break out books on the national scene. Notable authors who launched books at the store included Mark Helprin (Winter’s Tale), Richard North Patterson (The Lasko Tangent), and Walter Tevis (Queen’s Gambit). I was with the bookstores for seven years before moving to New York City, and have written more about the transition here on this site. The bookstore proved to be a gateway to my career in the book business and it all began on this date thirty-six years ago today.

Another nine years, May 4, 1987

Now working as an editor at Walker & Company, my first full-time position with a publishing house, I was in the happy position of telling my author Ellen Hunnicutt that her novel, Suite For Calliope: A Music and the Circus—the first book I signed up on arriving at the company, and which was to be published that summer—had just received a starred review in Kirkus. Ellen was very excited as I read her the whole review with lines like these, “An extraordinary first novel that, in its remarkable inventiveness, intelligence, and charm-struck humanity, should draw—and more than richly reward—readers of almost every inclination. . . . A prodigiously masterful novel of profundity, breadth, and continual delight: waiting now only for what ought to be its very, very many readers.” Note I read it to her, and didn’t fax it, probably because neither one of us had one. What added to the special quality of the occasion however was that this day, May 4, was also Ellen’s birthday. You can read more about how I came to discover Suite for Calliope in this essay elsewhere on this blog.

Nowadays, when May 4 rolls around again, even if nothing so deeply tragic or personally historic is occurring in that given year, I marvel at it all. For now, I’m just really glad I created this site over the past couple years, so that this year, I have a proper venue to share my memories of May 4, from 44 years ago, from 36 years ago, and from 27 years ago.

The pictures seen here were taken in what we called “the middle room” at Undercover Books, where we placed a comfortable rattan couch. The black Labrador is our dog Noah, whose ear Joel is massaging. I am wearing the same style of pink eyeglass frames as I wear nowadays. I’ve told the story of how Joel and I came to get Noah at a dog pound in Deadwood, South Dakota, on a cross-country road trip in the summer of 1970, on a biographical blog post I tweeted out it a few months ago, with a picture of Noah and me that I cherish. I miss them both, Noah who passed in 1982, and Joel in 2009.

6

“Life is a Carnival”*

The Bard Graduate Center on West 86th Street is a gem of a small New York museum. On my birthday last Saturday, Kyle asked me what I wanted to do for fun. I suggested we go view Bard’s current exhibit, “Circus and the City: New York, 1793-2010.”

I’ve loved the circus for years, and have even collected artwork on it, like the print below of high-wire artists on a bike, by Dame Laura Knight. I bought it  in 1987 from my late art dealer friend Robert Henry Adams when I was editing and publishing the splendid circus novel, Suite for Calliope: A Novel of Music and the Circus, by Ellen Hunnicutt, who won the Dru Heinz Literature Prize that same year for her short fiction collection, In the Music Library. Ellen’s novel centers around a young female protagonist who’s a runaway from a bizarre custody battle in her family. Holed up in the safe harbor of the Florida winter quarters of a circus troupe, throughout the novel she’s using their calliope to compose a musical work in memory of her late mother. The novel’s theme is how we may turn our mourning and loss to the service of art and creativity. For the record, Ellen passed away in 2005. I hope some day to republish her novel.

Much as I’ve read about circus lore, I had not understood a key aspect of the historical record as documented by the exhibit: the central role that NYC played in the growth and development of the circus throughout North America. Many of the biggest promoters were headquartered in Manhattan, the continent’s entertainment capitol. Once the circus began moving from town to town via train cars, Gotham’s status as a rail hub, as well as its large, diverse population, made it the essential city for promoters and performers alike.

The 20th century was covered on the third floor of the exhibit, with great photographs by Weegee, best known for his lurid crime scene photography, here depicting circus audiences enthralled by performances. There was also a video monitor showing a film of female stunt artist Tiny Kline performing the “Slide for Life,” in which she clamped down on a kind of leather bit she’d placed in her mouth, then slid on a cable for a 1,000 feet hanging above Times Square.

Along with the exhibit, which comprises more than 200 works displayed on three floors of the museum, there will be nine public talks given beginning October 11 and stretching into 2013, ending on January 31, discussing female equestrians; performance photography; the design and typography of circus posters; P.T. Barnum and Ralph Waldo Emerson; Alexander Calder; clowning; and the circus of the future. I hope to be there for one or more of these presentations. Meantime, here is a gallery of images from the exhibit. Please click through to view art and images from the exhibit.

*Thanks to The Band, for use of the title of their song, “Life is a Carnival, written by Rick Danko, Levon Helm, and J.R.R. Robertson, from their 1971 album, “Cahoots.”

7

Lost American Writer Found–Jim Tully

Until recently, I had not read even one of the fourteen books by the early- to mid-twentieth-century American writer Jim Tully (1886-1947) and knew little about him. Given my personal interest in Tully’s subject matter, which included circuses, hoboes, and riding the rails, springing from his twin milieux, rural Ohio and early Hollywood, I’m surprised at myself for having been slow to pick up on him. Now having sampled his work and discovered what an important and successful literary career he made in his life by reading the excellent new biography of him, Jim Tully: American Writer, Irish Rover, Hollywood Brawler, I’m going to do my part here to redress this widespread case of historical amnesia. I believe that now–especially in light of the Occupy movement and the attention it’s drawing to the economic distress afflicting millions in our society–is an ideal time for Jim Tully to be rediscovered. / / more . . .

8

About Philip Turner–Professional Background

Finding a Foothold in New York City This page of personal recollections of my path into publishing picks up where Philip Turner–Personal History ended, a web page complimentary to this one, about my years running Undercover Books with my family in Cleveland; from age sixteen attending two experimental educational institutions, the School on Magnolia, for […]