Site Archives

“The women’s presses keep the book in print until it finds its audience; Daughters, Inc. has gone back to press (sold out the first 3,000 copies) on every one of…

Editorial labor was a crucial — but often overlooked — aspect of creating not only the body of work we now recognize as feminist poetry (and its varied lineages) but…

William Maxwell is perhaps the most significant and least studied of midcentury American literary editors. This conjunction of literary impact and scholarly neglect tells us something about the constitutional reserve…

I would start out this essay with “Norman Holmes Pearson is best known as…,” but Norman Holmes Pearson isn’t particularly well-known as anything. For scholars of twentieth-century American literature, he surfaces…

In a closely argued three-page letter in 1946, Mary McCarthy flatly rejected New Yorker editor Katharine S. White’s revisions to her latest submission. “I’m afraid that the new manuscript strikes a chill…

In a 1993 Paris Review interview, Toni Morrison identifies the value of editing: “Good editors are really the third eye. Cool. Dispassionate. They don’t love you or your work; for me that…

When literary editors appear in fiction, they are often ambiguous and even duplicitous figures. The plot of Don DeLillo’s Mao II (1991) is set in motion in the top-floor office of a…