A Publishing House of Her Own | New Republic

As a child, Blanche Wolf wanted more than anything to live a life surrounded by books. Born in 1894, and raised in Manhattan by well-to-do parents, her love of reading and culture set her apart from her family and their upwardly-mobile, secular, and socially-constrained Jewish community. When she met Alfred Knopf in 1911, she was attracted most of all to his bookishness - which, one suspects, he might have played up in order to win over the pretty redhead, underestimating how serious she was about it. Her dream life was simple, heartbreakingly so: "We decided we would get married and make books and publish them." How could she have known that the hardest part of that dream was the "we"?

When the house of Knopf launched in 1915, publishing was a gentleman's pursuit - amateur, clubbish, WASP, and above all, male. Blanche and Alfred navigated this casually anti-Semitic world, holding themselves aloof from their alcoholic, philandering competitor, the "pushy Jew" Horace Liveright, founder of the Modern Library and publisher of T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land.