The Tender Hour of Twilight
Paris in the '50s, New York in the '60s: A Memoir of Publishing's Golden Age
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- $17.99
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- $17.99
Publisher Description
From Beckett to Burroughs, The Story of O to The Autobiography of Malcolm X, an iconic literary troublemaker tells the colorful stories behind the stories
Richard Seaver came to Paris in 1950 seeking Hemingway's moveable feast. Paris had become a different city, traumatized by World War II, yet the red wine still flowed, the cafés bustled, and the Parisian women found American men exotic and heroic. There was an Irishman in Paris writing plays and novels unlike anything anyone had ever read—but hardly anyone was reading them. There were others, too, doing equivalently groundbreaking work for equivalently small audiences. So when his friends launched a literary magazine, Merlin, Seaver knew this was his calling: to bring the work of the likes of Samuel Beckett, Eugene Ionesco, and Jean Genet to the world. The Korean War ended all that—the navy had paid for college and it was time to pay them back. After two years at sea, Seaver washed ashore in New York City with a beautiful French wife and a wider sense of the world than his compatriots. The only young literary man with the audacity to match Seaver's own was Barney Rosset of Grove Press. A remarkable partnership was born, one that would demolish U.S. censorship laws with inimitable joie de vivre as Seaver and Rosset introduced American readers to Lady Chatterly's Lover, Henry Miller, Story of O, William Burroughs, The Autobiography of Malcolm X, and more. As publishing hurtles into its uncertain future, The Tender Hour of Twilight is a stirring reminder of the passion, the vitality, and even the glamour of a true life in literature.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Like many American writers in the 1950s, Seaver went to Paris in search of the golden age of adventurous expatriate writers like Hemingway. Soon after his arrival, however, Seaver created his own golden age with his eloquent essays that introduced Samuel Beckett to the world and his adventurous exploits in publishing with the literary journal Merlin, whose fame he helped establish with the writings of Beckett, Sartre, and Ionesco. In this charming memoir, edited by his wife, Jeanette, Seaver cleverly chronicles his decade in Paris, where he met his wife, dipped his toes into book publishing, and introduced not only Beckett and Ionesco but also Jean Genet and numerous others to the world. After a stint in the Navy, Seaver moved to New York and entered publishing, first as a book club editor and scout and then most famously as the editor-in-chief of Grove Press. Grove's founder, Barney Rosset, had noticed Seaver's work on Merlin and had begun courting him even before Seaver left Paris. Together, they built a remarkable list that included the unexpurgated edition of Lady Chatterley's Lover, Marguerite Duras, Kenneth Koch, William Burroughs, Alain Robbe-Grillet, and even Eric Berne's best-selling Games People Play. In those heady days of publishing, as Seaver nicely and insightfully details, he and Rosset signed up books if the manuscript was good, the author serious, and the premise was provocative and controversial.
