Boni & Liveright was a publishing house established in 1916 in New York City by Albert Boni and Horace Liveright which made a name by publishing work considered avant-garde and in so doing published work by many modernist authors. They attracted attention from the Society for Suppression of Vice for contracting with James Joyce to publish an American edition of "Ulysses". They marketed books to an audience in the northeast and California, and in 1917 began the Modern Library imprint which reissued work written by European authors. The business failed during the Great Depression, although an employee bought and continued to publish the Modern Library books.
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In contrast to more traditional and conservative American publishing companies, often located in Boston, Boni & Liveright was located in New York. They introduced to American readers many European authors such as Checkhov, Dostoyevsky, Ibsen, Nietsche, Tolstoy, H. G. Wells, and Kipling. In the post-World War I years, through the roaring twenties to the Great Depression, there were fewer than 500 bookstores in the country, all clustered around major cities and areas of population. Boni & Liveright, like other new publishers of the era such as Alfred A. Knopf, sold to customers predominantly in the northeast and California. In general the US was not considered much of a "book-reading" country and most publishers failed to reach a mass readership.[1]
Boni, who was employed in an office before joining Liveright in the publishing business, had an idea to publish reprints of European writers, and in 1917 the company started the publication of the Modern Library series, which they later sold to an employee, Bennett Cerf.[2] The Modern Library series became instantly popular, "selling hundreds of thousands of copies". Although he seldom read manuscripts himself, Liveright gambled on authors that sold well in the 1920s.Eugene O'Neill's play Strange Interlude sold more than 100,000 copies.[3]
The aim of the company was to publish work by modern authors. Boni & Liveright often printed works by authors considered to be avant-garde and even immoral according to anti-vice societies of the period.[4] They published works by modernist authors such as Theodore Dreiser, John Reed, Eugene O'Neill, Leo Stein, Conrad Aiken, Hilda Doolittle, Sherwood Anderson, Ernest Hemingway, Ezra Pound, e.e. cummings and William Faulkner.[4][5]
In 1917 Alfred Knopf, another newly established New York publishing house, published Ezra Pound's Lustra to poor reviews and sales. The following year Boni & Liveright agreed to publish for Pound a collection of prose, Instigations, which included an essay by Ernest Fenellosa. Boni & Liveright bought Pound's next volume of poetry, Poems: 1918-1921; the publisher's inclusion of the date in the title was considered daring and innovative. Liveright traveled to Paris to meet with Pound where he was introduced to and made arrangements with James Joyce and T.S. Eliot to publish their work. Liveright published Pound's Personae in 1925, retaining rights to the work well into the 1940s after the company collapsed and submerged with Random House.[5]
In 1921 Boni & Liveright agreed to publish James Joyce's Ulysses, but were forced to withdraw from the contract because of actions by the Society for Suppression of Vice that brought censure from the authorities.[6] The firm published T.S. Eliot's poem The Waste Land in 1922; that year Eliot also published the work in the first issue of The Criterion, a British literary magazine.[7]
David Welky writes in Everything was Better in America: Print Culture in the Great Depression, that Liveright was a gregarious handsome man who hired talented employees. Lillian Hellman worked in the advertising department and read manuscripts; many of his other employees went on to start well-known publishing houses, such as Julian Messner of Messner, Leon Shimkin of Simon & Shuster, and Cerf, who bought the Modern Library series, and established Random House.[3] Although known as an artistic and even exciting publishing house in the 1920s, the company did not survive increased commercialization in the business and collapsed in 1930.[2][8]