The Lousy Racket: Hemingway, Scribners, and the Business of Literature - Hardcover

Trogdon, Robert

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0873389042 ISBN 13: 9780873389044

Publisher: The Kent State University Press, 2007

Synopsis

The business of making an American literary icon

The Lousy Racket is a thorough examination of Ernest Hemingway’s working relationship with his American publisher, Charles Scribner’s Sons, and with his editors there: Maxwell Perkins, Wallace Meyer, and Charles Scribner III. This first critical study of Hemingway’s professional collaboration with Scribners also details the editing, promotion, and sales of the books he published with the firm from 1926 to 1952 and provides a fascinating look into the American publishing industry in the early twentieth century.

This painstakingly researched study reveals the working relationship between Hemingway and his editors, with special emphasis on the friendship that developed between Hemingway and the dean of American book editors, Maxwell Perkins. Drawing on many unpublished resources, including correspondence between Hemingway and his editors and others in the firm, as well as printing, advertising records, and sales dummies,
Robert W. Trogdon shows how Hemingway’s public reputation was shaped in large part by Scribners.

Hemingway scholars will appreciate this contribution to Hemingway studies, and The Lousy Racket is an important contribution to studies in the modernist era in American literature and to book history.

About this title

About the Author

Robert W. Trogdon is professor and chair of English at Kent State University, assistant executive editor of The Works of Joseph Conrad, and coeditor of The Letters of Ernest Hemingway.

Reviews

It's not easy to write something fresh about the oft-researched and dissected works and life of Ernest Hemingway. But thanks to an awful lot of investigation into the unpublished materials from the Charles Scribner's Sons Archive at Princeton University and the Ernest Hemingway Collection at the John F. Kennedy Library, Trogdon, a Hemingway scholar and professor at Kent State University, sheds some new light on some old works. Based primarily on letters written by Hemingway and his Scribner's editor, Maxwell Perkins, this book casts a discerning eye on both Hemingway's writing process as well as the business of book publishing from the perspectives of the author and the publisher. After Maxwell brought Hemingway to Scribner's at the urging of F. Scott Fitzgerald, the two fell into a solid working relationship. As Hemingway developed an idea, Maxwell used praise and deadlines to push the process along. Though Maxwell gave snippets of advice on character development and plot points, Trogdon's research shows that Maxwell did little editing when it came to Hemingway's prose, as most of their correspondence shows that the editor's main concerns were changing " 'objectionable words'" and veiled references to real people to protect his author from suppression and libel. Though the book is dense with quotations, Trogdon writes straightforward, unaffected prose. (May)
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Edition details

• Publisher: The Kent State University Press
• Publication date: 2007
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0873389042
• ISBN 13: 9780873389044
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 320