Questioning the Critical Reaction to Ben Urwand’s “The Collaboration: Hollywood’s Pact w/Hitler”

The CollaborationReaders here may recall I’ve previously written about Ben Urwand’s book  The Collaboration: Hollywood’s Pact with Hitler. The first time was last June, in Still More to Learn about Corporations’ Complicity with the Third Reich, after the NY Times’ Jennifer Schuessler wrote a preview story on Urwand, a young Australian* scholar, and his thesis: that major Hollywood studios, including many of its key moguls including Jack Warner, Samuel Goldwyn, and Louis B. Mayer, worked with the Third Reich to make their movies acceptable to the Nazis, thus permitting them to continue being shown to German audiences. Urwand contends this “collaboration” started before WWII, and continued during the war itself. The book has now been officially published, and as I expected, there is criticism of it and the author. I know from my involvement with independent scholar Edwin Black‘s IBM and the Holocaust: The Strategic Alliance Between Nazi Germany and America’s Most Powerful Corporation (2001), that writers who tackle big targets get the most criticism. Moreover, Urwand is something of an unconventional scholar–he holds no teaching position, is a Junior Fellow of of the Society of Fellows at Harvard University, and has a biography that includes time spent as a member of the successful rock n’ roll band, The Attachments.

Vociferous criticism has come from New Yorker film critic David Denby, and film historian David Thomson. I respect both of them as writers, but Denby’s claim that much of what’s in the book was already known, is not accurate. Urwand’s sources included archives and business records that no English-speaking historian had ever worked with, so how can the book fail to contain new material? Even if it were correct, can there no new interpretations of previously examined events? Though I don’t agree with the jaded Denby or the skeptical Thomson, I don’t consider them to be arguing in bad faith.

However, some of the other commentary has been way over the top, and coming from questionable sources replete with big credibility issues. For instance, a grandniece of Louis B. Mayer, Alicia Mayer,* who keeps the family flame burning with a website called Hollywood Essays, is campaigning to discredit Urwand’s book, and is getting some coverage doing so. Outlets covering her should ask about and report on the large personal stake she has in seeing her great-uncle exonerated by history. Her comments ought to be viewed with great skepticism. There is a slight hysteria in her attitude, as in the opening line of one piece, she pleads with readers: “I need your help. Imagine for a moment that your family has been accused of collaborating with Hitler and the Nazis.” Her plaint doesn’t address the substance of the book, only suggests how horrible is to be a descendant of someone accused of bad conduct in business. In a bizarre twist, she’s even going after the publicity firm that’s working with Urwand and Harvard University Press:

“After a cunning and manipulative pre-launch campaign by Goldberg McDuffie Communications (GMC) for Ben Urwand’s The Collaboration: Hollywood’s Pact with Hitler, which resulted in odd, gushing ‘reviews’ for the book back in late June, the tide has now turned and negative reviews (scroll down) are flowing just as the book is released. Even as an editor, it never occurred to me that book publicity could have a dark side but Lynn Goldberg, Megan Beatie and Kathleen Zrelak of GMC have orchestrated interviews, coverage and appearances for the perennially grim-looking Urwand, that will in hindsight appear unworthy at best, and sinister at worst.”

This is weird, ad hominem crap that should utterly disqualify the party slinging the stuff from being taken at all seriously.

An underlying subtext here, which probably explains some of the vituperation directed toward Urwand, is that while he is himself Jewish, some people question his motives in laying blame on the men that ran some of the big studios, who happened to be Jewish, as if no co-religionist should find fault with a fellow member of the tribe. Such parochial defensiveness is an extreme response to a scholar’s work. Personal unease over the charge that Jewish moguls in Hollywood let personal self-interest drive their policy toward the Third Reich is blinding some critics from giving a fair reading to Urwand’s book.

There’s even one attack from a blogger* who seeks to call in to question Urwand’s Jewishness because it was reported he ate a lobster salad (non-kosher) during an interview with a reporter. Alicia Mayer, along with Denby demanded that Urwand’s Harvard University Press withdraw the book from distribution, “correct” it according to their reading of it, and then only then re-release it! Were such steps ever taken it would be an appalling abuse of free speech and the moral right of an author to follow historical evidence and publish the results as they see fit.

Urwand and his book do have defenders. Among them are Sir Richard Evans, Regius Professor of History and President of Wolfson College at Cambridge University, a leading figure in the study of 20th Century Germany. He endorsed The Collaboration with the statement below that is printed on the book and continues to defend it vigorously, especially on his twitter feed, @RichardEvans36.

“Full of startling and surprising revelations, presented in exemplary fashion, without any moralizing or sensationalism. The Collaboration shows how Hollywood and especially the big studios went along with German demands to censor movies not only before but especially after the Nazi seizure of power.” 

I will continue to write about Urwand’s book in the weeks to come, as I complete my own reading of it. Meantime, here’s a video of Urwand discussing his work.

 * Oddly, Australia is a recurring motif here, as Urwand, Alicia Mayer, and the blogger who questioned why Urwand was eating lobster salad are all from Australia. Please note I have chosen not to link to the websites of Alicia Mayer and the other blogger from Australia. 

Wrapping Up a Week of NY Celebrations & Great Reading

It’s been a celebratory week in NYC and an active one on The Great Gray Bridge, so here is a summary of recent highlights for interested readers who may have missed any of them.

Ruth Gruber & Philip Turner1) Celebrating Photojournalist & Author Ruth Gruber’s 102nd Birthday With Her
2) Word of an Important New Book on Bob Dylan By a ’60s Confidant
3) Celebrating Valerie Plame’s “Blowback”&Recalling Tumultous Events of a Decade Ago
4) 
#FridayReads, Oct. 4–Katie Hafner’s Exquisite Memoir “Mother Daughter Me”

Celebrating Valerie Plame’s “Blowback” & Recalling Tumultous Events of a Decade Ago

 

Blowback frontKyle and Ewan and I had a great time last night at the book party for Valerie Plame’s terrific new spy novel Blowback, co-authored with Sarah Lovett. I  had picked up a galley of it at BEA last June, and really enjoyed it a lot. I’d been looking forward to the party for some weeks, as in 2003-04 I edited and published The Politics of Truth–A Diplomat’s Memoir: Insider the Lies that Led to War and Betrayed My Wife’s CIA Identity by Valerie’s husband, Ambassador Joseph Wilson. It was going to be a treat to see Valerie and Joe last night.

Joe and I had last met up in 2010 when he was part of a New York Times panel that included Nora Ephron, Anna Devere Smith, Roy Blount, Jr., and Garrison Keillor marking the 25th anniversary of the Times’ Op-Ed pages. It was moderated by then Op-Ed page editor David Shipley*, who invited Joe because he judged Joe’s July 6 2003 op-ed  What I Didn’t Find in Africa had been one of the most historically significant columns the newspaper published that decade. It led to the Bush administration’s repeated disclosures that Joe’s wife Valerie Plame was a CIA official and years of flimsy denials that the administration had doctored the intelligence that fueled their false claims about WMDs in Iraq, enabling the unjustified invasion of the country.

Publishing The Politics of Truth was a high-wire act for Joe, for me and for Carroll & Graf that lasted over a year. In July ’03, I heard about it right away when Valerie’s CIA employment was reported by columnist Robert Novak. A few weeks later indie book publicist Barbara Monteiro connected me with Joe. She had earlier worked on the book I did with Whitewater heroine Susan MacDougal. Barbara knew my sense of justice would’ve been offended by what was being done to Valerie, and Joe. He had been writing opinion columns about Bush’s misguided rush to war and was already thinking of writing a book. We quickly made a deal and got to work while the news story swirling around Valerie and Joe grew and grew.

Right off the bat, we were fortunate in that before retiring from the State Dept in 1998, following 25 years in the foreign service, Joe had sat for a full oral history of his career. He had the transcript and used it as an aide-mémoire and the basis of the historical portions of the book, later justifying our use of two subtitles on the front cover and spine! With this foundation, Joe then wrote practically every day and in February ’04 he delivered an excellent 150,000 word manuscript to me. C & G leapt in to action, as colleagues from several departments and I line-edited, copyedited, designed, typeset, indexed, and produced the book on a “crash” production schedule, for planned release only four months later, in what was going to be May ’04, less than a year after Novak’s column. From a marketing and strategic standpoint, it was like riding a tiger.

The toughest part of this as a publishing proposition was that though the story had only gotten bigger over the intervening months–and while we knew we’d be able to book Joe on tons of media–at the same time we wondered and worried:

  • What will be the state of the journalistic investigations and of the federal grand jury hearings looking into the unauthorized disclosure when we publish the book?
  • How can Joe in the book, in his public statements, and we in our press materials take advantage of new developments while still conforming to the latest important events?
  • How could we take advantage of breaking news but not have Joe get too far out on things that were constantly shifting?

Of course, for Valerie and Joe it was more than a publishing proposition, it was their lives. This was a dynamic in publishing a book I had never encountered before, a delicate strategic challenge. I was already a highly-tuned-in-to-news-person, especially after the 2000 presidential election and 9/11, but this tendency became even more pronounced the year I was actively working every day on Joe’s book. The book sold more than 60,000 copies in hardcover and spent more than a month on the NY Times Bestseller list. I have written about the lessons I learned working on it a number of times on this blog, in such posts as “Hubris”–10 Years Later, Run-up to the Iraq War Still Shadows the Media & the U.S. and On the Imperative of Publishing Whistleblowers.

Last night’s party for Valerie and Sarah Lovett was hosted by director Doug Liman, author Naomi Wolf, and producer Avram Ludwig. Liman had directed the 2010 movies “Fair Game” with Naomi Watts and Sean Penn, based on Valerie’s 2006 book, Fair Game: My Life as a Spy, My Betrayal by the White House and on The Politics of Truth.

We enjoyed meeting the three co-hosts and many of our fellow guests. Among the latter group was one of my favorite suspense writers Lee Child, with whom we happened to ride up in the elevator. About Blowback he’s said: “Great storytelling, real insider authenticity, and above all a fascinating main character in Vanessa Pierson. And maybe those initials are not a coincidence–sometimes fiction can reveal things nonfiction can’t.” The latter part of Child’s blurb–and the reference to “redaction” in my tweet above–are rueful nods to the unfortunate fact that Fair Game was heavily redacted by the Bush-era CIA, and though it had a well-reported Afterword by national security reporter Laura Rozen, the many blacked-out passages inevitably left readers in the dark in many areas. I’ve included three of Child’s books among my weekly #FridayReads essays, including Worth Dying For, a true corker of a suspense novel, the first of Child’s Jack Reacher books that I read. His latest is  Never Go Back, which I am eager to read. Guest Maggie Topkis–longtime co-proprietor of the NYC mystery bookstore Partners and Crime who nowadays works with Lee Child–told me she thinks it’s his best book yet, which is saying a lot.

I met co-author Sarah Lovett, and told her how much I’d enjoyed reading Blowback. From Blue Rider Press, I congratulated David Rosenthal, Valerie’s publisher, and Executive Editor Sarah Hochman. I was also glad to see the two sides of the recent Penguin Random House merger well represented, with Kent Anderson, a sales rep from Penguin (now Penguin Random House). He had been with Publishers Group West, distributor for Carroll & Graf, when I published The Politics of Truth there in 2004. With Kent, I saw Madeline McIntosh, COO of Random House, a senior executive in the merged company. I liked that she had come to this book party for a key title of a Penguin imprint.   

I was also glad to see book biz pal Will Schwalbe,* who after a distinguished publishing career has made himself in to a successful author most recently with The End of Your Life Book Club, which I wrote about here. Will explained that he and Naomi had been old college classmates, and said how much he’d enjoyed her poetry from those years. Naomi seemed touched by that. Will graciously introduced me to Naomi who asked how I had come to know Joe and Valerie, at which I mentioned The Politics of Truth . She said how glad she was to be able to show special support for Valerie and her new book. Those comments were echoed when a few minutes later she and Doug Liman convened the gathering for toasts and congratulations. Liman gestured toward a nearby portrait of his late father, the prominent lawyer Arthur Liman, a pivotal player in the Iran-Contra scandal who served as chief counsel to the Senate committee that investigated the Reagan’s administration’s notorious arms-for-hostages conspiracy. The younger Liman cited his father’s example as an inspiration to him in working with dedicated public servants like Valerie and Joe.

After the toasts, I approached Joe once more. As we chatted Ewan took a picture of us. Here it is, along with a few others from last night. (Please click here to see all pics) It was a fun book party and the three of us were very happy to be a part of the celebration.

If you’re looking for realistic and pacy suspense fiction with a smart and appealing female protagonist, I highly recommend Blowback , the first of a series featuring covert operative Vanessa Pierson. Valerie has done lots of media this week including “Morning Joe” (See video below.) One of Valerie’s next stops is going to be in Washington, DC this Friday night, October 5, when Laura Rozen will be interviewing her at Politics & Prose Bookstore.

*Will Schwalbe’s first book, SEND: Why People Email So Badly and How to Do It Better was co-authored with the same David Shipley– Joe Wilson’s Op-Ed editor and moderator of the NY Times panel with Joe, Nora Ephron, etc.

 

Word of an Important New Book on Bob Dylan By a ’60s Confidant

October 2 Update: Earlier this story about a new Dylan book was only reported on a subscription-required only website. Now it’s also been covered in Publishers Weekly and here is a link to that story.

dylanmaymudesWord comes from BookBrunch’s Liz Thomson (subscription required) of a new memoir about Bob Dylan, by a hitherto little-known associate named Victor Maymudes who reportedly served as tour manager, driver, and Dylan confidant beginning in 1961. The photo here by Daniel Kramer shows the two playing chess in Woodstock, NY. Reportedly, he was at Newport when Dylan controversially went electric for the first time, and also on the UK tour that led to D.A. Pennebaker’s classic documentary “Dont Look Back” (sic). Maymudes died before he could finish the manuscript. The photos, tapes, film, and papers passed to his son, Jacob, and then barely survived a fire that wrecked the younger Maymudes’ home. He will now complete the manuscript. The book already has an editor and publisher in the States, George Witte of St. Martin’s Press, who’s been following the fate of the manuscript since the beginning of the century. According to Thomson, Jacob Maymudes and his agent are still seeking a UK publisher, and other foreign partners. A documentary is also reported to be in the works, with this video trailer prepared to introduce Victor Maymudes’ work to interested parties.

Brooklyn Book Festival, 2013 Edition–w/Thirty Photos

Brooklyn Book Festival GuideLast Sunday, which happened to be my birthday, Kyle and I headed out to the Brooklyn Book Festival, the third year in a row we’ve attended this urban book extravaganza. We had a great time at this event which for us has replaced BEA as the most enjoyable book occasion on our literary calendar. We spent nearly 3 hours in Brooklyn, enjoying the crisp autumn air, blue skies, bright sunshine, and many serendipitous encounters with friendly bookpeople. If you’re in the NYC area, and you’ve never been to the Brooklyn Book festival, I urge you to go next year. It was a great way to spend a birthday, especially because we followed it by having a meal at a new restaurant we were eager to try, A Taste of Persia, covered yesterday on this blog. All the photos in this post were taken by Kyle Gallup. Click here to view them.

Taste of Persia, Flavorful New Restaurant Near Union Square

A few weeks ago I read a restaurant review of A Taste of Persia, a new eating spot near Union Square in Manhattan. The review was by Ligaya Mishan, who writes a NY Times column called Hungry City. The piece was delightful, with paragraphs like this:

“For two decades, Mr. [Saeed] Pourkay, a Tehrani émigré, ran a print shop across the street from the pizzeria. After cashing out his share in the business a few years ago (to go “searching for my happiness,” he said), he started selling ash reshteh, a wondrous, wintry, outrageously thick Persian soup, at the Union Square Holiday Market. Fans clamored. Happiness was found. This past March, he returned to 18th Street and set up under his former neighbor’s roof. Here, in an imposing vat, is the justly fabled ash reshteh, a result of the eight-hour communion of five kinds of beans, a riot of herbs and onion cooked down to a sweet density. Dark and luxuriant, it has no broth and only a trace of oil. Broken strands of linguine snake through it. Fenugreek lurks, faint but insistently bittersweet, underscoring cinnamon, cardamom and ginger. But it is the garnishes that turn it into poetry: caramelized, verging-on-burned garlic; dried mint flicked in a pan; crispy fried onion; and a swirl of kashk, a Persian whey more sour than yogurt, with a bite like feta.”

This was a chef whose food I really wanted to taste.

Last Sunday, which happened to be my birthday, Kyle and I headed out to the Brooklyn Book Festival. We had a great time at this event which for us has replaced BEA as the most enjoyable book event on our literary calendar. I’ll post some pictures from the fair later, and meantime here’s just one of the shots that Kyle took.Reader

After nearly 3 hours in Brooklyn, enjoying the crisp autumn air, blue skies, bright sunshine, and many serendipitous encounters with friendly bookpeople, we took the subway back in to Manhattan and walked over to 18th Street for our first meal at A Taste of Persia.

Not as spicy as some overly familiar Indian fare, the dishes we tried were distinctive and different from any similar food we’ve encountered in the city. The tastes and textures left no doubt that the dishes had simmered for hours. There was a smoothness and total mingling of flavors that only comes from slow and patient cooking. We met Chef Pourkay, as genial and hospitable as any maitre’d you’ll ever be greeted by in a four-star hotel dining room. He exudes genuine warmth and takes great pride in serving this food. Even after we’d finished our angus beef stew with celery and a chick pea dish cooked with tomato and cilantro, he offered us a gratis take-away sample of a lamb stew he’d just finished preparing.

We met two other diners, one of whom said he works in the fashion industry. These Iranian New Yorkers were breaking up pieces of a soft flatbread and dunking them in a savory soup. Chatting with them while Chef Pourkay readied our take-away, I told them that I enjoy listening to Iranian-Canadian Jian Ghomeshi, host of CBC Radio’s daily culture and current affairs program “Q”, which is carried in New York City on WNYC FM weeknights at 10 PM. I told them and Chef Pourkay that I will urge Jian to visit A Taste of Persia the next time he comes to NY for a live taping of “Q.” I’m sure he’ll love the food. Below are photos Kyle and I took during our visit to the restaurant. What a great way to spend my birthday!

#FridayReads, Sept. 20–Erskine Childers’ “Riddle of the Sands & Ben Urwand’s “Collaboration: Hollywood’s Pact w/Hitler”


Riddle of the SandsAs noted in the above tweet for my #FridayReads a week ago, I was then enjoying the two excellent books named above. The first–The Riddle of the Sands, published in 1903–is arguably the first espionage thriller of the 20th century, though it’s written nothing like spy fiction is written today. It’s a heady and languorous narrative full of maritime adventuring set in the waters of the North Sea and its tidal rivers. The characters tumble in to some intrigue involving Britain and Germany, and the book fascinatingly anticipates many geopolitical issues that became even more pertinent to international relations in the following decades, during WWI and WWII. I used to stock and sell Childers’ book when I ran Undercover Books from 1978-85 as it was frequently assigned to high school students in the local school systems. This in itself is kind of amazing, because it is a complex, sophisticated book and I have a hard time imagining many high school students nowadays reading it, and getting through it. I think it’s also read often by sailors, mariners, and merchant seamen, for as the title suggests the characters are able to develop keen intuition for navigating the waters and the intrigue in to which they are plunged. Recently, Michael Dirda, one of the best book critics around, wrote a fascinating review of ‘Riddle’ in the BN Review which reminded me I had always meant to read the book. I found the second-hand Penguin edition pictured here, and have been relishing every new turn in the unfolding plot. I recommend you read Dirda’s review, even if you don’t have time right now for the book itself.Riddle of the Sands back

The other book, my nonfiction this week, is  The Collaboration: Hollywood’s Pact with Hitler, by a young Australian scholar named Ben Urwand, a revelatory and controversial investigation into what he believes–based on documents and correspondence he found–was the close relationship, even alliance from the 1930s, and in at least one instance stretching in to the 1940s, between several US movie production companies and the Third Reich. I learned about the book in the summer, when the New York Times previewed the book, and I wrote about it then in a post titled Still More to Learn about Corporations’ Complicity with the Third Reich. I wrote then,Collaboration

In 2000, while an editor at Crown Publishing, I acquired a book that later became an international sensation and a bestseller in the US. It was IBM and the Holocaust: The Strategic Alliance Between Nazi Germany and America’s Most Powerful Corporation by Edwin Black. I believed it was imperative that the book be published because it documented hitherto unknown revelations such as the fact that IBM’s punch card tabulation system was licensed to the Third Reich which then used the technology to catalog and keep track of Jews and others under its rule they deemed undesirables. Turned out that corporate complicity with Hitler was as American as cherry pie.

I want to add that later, in 2006, I edited and published another book in this area, Ibsen and Hitler: The Playwright, the Plagiarist, and the Plot for the Third Reich, in which scholar Steven F. Sage put forth a startling thesis, that long before the Final Solution, Adolf Hitler’s crimes included a kind of theft of intellectual property. The author marshaled lots of evidence to to show that a trio of plays by Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906) had provided Hitler with the script for his hegemonic career. With egotism and braggadocio, he saw himself as the star of a historical drama that mimicked Ibsen’s works. Sage showed that baffling incidents, including poor strategic choices, became understandable as part of a connected plot. He also traces ties between Hitler and a literary cult that warped Ibsen’s humanistic vision to suit their fascist designs, elevating Hitler as their anointed instrument. Sage’s book, and now Urwand’s, point to Hitler’s obsession with narrative drama, whether on the stage or on the silver screen. Both authors document Hitler’s propensity to repeatedly view the same theatrical and cinematic presentations. Sage writes that Hitler would see the same play over and over again, until he reached a point where he felt like he had in some sense become the drama’s hero. It’s striking that the two authors have, in this respect, developed similar theses. If you’re interested, I’ve pasted in the flap copy to Ibsen and Hitler at the bottom of this post which you may click on to read in full. Ibsen & Hitler

There’s already been a fair amount of criticism of Urwand, who is something of an unconventional scholar–he holds no teaching position, is a Junior Fellow of of the Society of Fellows at Harvard University, and has a background that includes being part of a successful rock n’ roll band, The Attachments. You can learn more about Urwand and his book here. The critics of the book have included David Denby in the New Yorker, who seems to take personal offense at the thesis, and claims there’s not much in the book we didn’t know already. I don’t share his jaded response and am eager to continue reading how and why executives likes Louis B. Mayer produced movies that they hoped would please the Third Reich and be shown to audiences in Germany.
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#FridayReads, Sept 6–Celebrating Robertson Davies’ 100th

#FridayReads, Sept. 6–The many books of Canadian novelist Robertson Davies, which I have had the pleasure of reading and enjoying over the past 30 years.

August 28, 2013, was the 100th anniversary of the birth of Robertson Davies, the great Canadian novelist and all around man of letters. The Canadian postal service is marking the anniversary by issuing the stamp below. When I ran Undercover Books in Cleveland, Ohio, which opened in 1978, we introduced thousands of U.S. readers to books by Canadian authors, particularly including Davies.* We were doing so much business in his books at one point in the early ’80s that I wrote Davies a letter c/o of his publisher Viking Penguin to let him know. He responded from ivied Massey College in Toronto, where he was a Don of Letters, and a pleasant correspondence between us ensued over a couple of years. Later, organizers of a writing conference at Case Western Reserve University asked me to invite Davies to a big meeting of theirs, but he declined, explaining he was averse to travel. The organizers asked me if I would instead speak on the combined experience of reading and selling Davies’ books, an invitation I accepted. In my files somewhere is a transcript of the talk I gave and the letters I exchanged with Davies. I will dig them out someday soon and scan them for this site and my newly renamed tumblr, Hono(u)rary Canadian, where I’ve also covered the new Davies stamp.

If you haven’t yet read Davies’ work, I still recommend his books highly. Most readers start with his Deptford Trilogy, and its opening book, Fifth Business, which was first published in 1970, followed in the trilogy by The Manticore and World of Wonders. Their motifs are indelible painted in my mind, though I haven’t re-read the books in more than 20 years: saints, snowballs, magicians, and freakish beauty. His earlier books–Tempest-Tost, Leaven of Malice, and A Mixture of Frailties–collectively known as the Salterton Trilogy, are also very enjoyable. His first break-out book, as a hardcover bestseller, was Rebel Angels, thanks in good part to the enlarged audience that my store, and other indie booksellers, brought to his books.

I’m really glad Robertson Davies is being remembered with this special stamp, which was announced at the Canada Post website and covered at Quill & Quire magazine. Below the stamp are photos of my copies of Davies’ books.  Please click here to see all photos.Robertson Davies stamp
* In a page on this website devoted to my career, Philip Turner–Professional Background, under the heading “Hono(u)rary Canadian” I present more info on Canadian authors I’ve worked with:
As a native of the Great Lakes region, I have a keen affinity for Canadian books and authors, seeing the book world of the U.S.’s upper Midwest and Canada’s southern tier (and one might argue, the whole of the Pacific Northwest) as contiguous literary cultures. As an Ohio bookseller, I introduced thousands of U.S. readers to such Canadian authors as Robertson Davies, Margaret Atwood, Mordecai Richler, Margaret Laurence, Timothy Findley Farley Mowat, and Pierre Berton. As an editor and publisher, I broadened that effort, publishing U.S. editions of books by Atwood, Richler, Mowat, Berton, and Dallaire, as well as Paul Quarrington, Antonine Maillet, Ken McGoogan, Julian Sher, William Marsden, Elaine Dewar, Bonnie Buxton, Howard Engel, Joan Barfoot, George Eliot Clarke, Steven Galloway, Stephen Strauss, Joel Hynes, Paul Anderson, Sheila Munro, and Jan Lars Jensen, among others.