Father To Daughter: The Family Letters of Maxwell Perkins

Maxwell Perkins, the legendary editor who discovered and championed some of America’s most canonical novelists, is less well known as a father, but in fact he was a devoted family man with five daughters. For the nearly forty decades he worked for Charles Scribner in New York, his wife and children spent summers in Windsor, Vermont, in a family compound of houses and cultivated woods established by his maternal grandfather. They called it “Paradise,” which is what it was to Perkins, who’d return there for holidays and any other time he could get away long enough to make the commute by train.

When he couldn’t get away, he wrote letters to his girls. One daughter per day.

Filled with the same humor and gentle guidance he used in working with his famous authors—Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Thomas Wolfe, among others—the letters reveal the personality of a man who was reflective, thoughtful, surprisingly whimsical, and deeply loving. Most of the letters include pen-and-ink illustrations Perkins drew himself, depicting what he was doing, or had done, or imagined his girls doing. He wrote and drew about events both unusual and mundane, from his stint camped on the Mexican border in the New Jersey National Guard to the train journeys to and from Vermont—and always about how much he missed his family.

Father to Daughter isn’t just a touching collection of letters from the heart of a man remembered more for his mind, but an uplifting look at the ties that bind us, no matter how far apart we may be.