Harvard University Press Publicity Blog

"At least as smart as James Madison"

The always-witty New York magazine reviews the new HBO series "John Adams," opining in the process that "anyone who’s dipped into the thousand letters that passed between John and Abigail during their 54 years of marriage knows that Abigail was at least as smart as James Madison." Well what they didn't tell you was that those very letters are available in toto from your friends at HUP, in a brand-new edition titled My Dearest Friend: Letters of Abigail and John Adams. The book has been a smash; check out the HUP page for extra features including audio interviews and essays from the editors.

My Dearest Friend--Faneuil Hall event video

A few weeks ago HUP and the Massachusetts Historical Society hosted a big to-do featuring prominent political couples reading selections from the correspondence of John and Abigail Adams as collected in the new book My Dearest Friend: Letters of Abigail and John Adams.

WGBH was on hand to film the event, and they've now put audio and video up on their Forum website for your viewing pleasure. It was quite an entertaining night, so head over and check it out...

The biographer's conundrum

Carl Rollyson reviews Nigel Hamilton's Biography: A Brief History in today's New York Sun and takes the opportunity to address the question of why "among the literati [biography] is generally considered a species of slumming."

He asks: "When did biography--a rather distinguished genre in the days of Plutarch and Suetonius--lose literary rank?" His conclusion? "As soon as the first biographers tried to deal frankly with the private as well as the public lives of their subjects."

Hamilton discussed these and other issues just down the street at Porter Square Books last night--by all accounts the event was a success, which proves that despite the frowns of the mandarins, biography as a genre isn't going anywhere just yet.

Walter-Benjamin-Platz

Sometimes around here it can feel like all Walter Benjamin, all the time (an exaggeration, surely, but he has been called our "patron saint," after all).

So I was excited this summer during my trip to Berlin, when, during a stroll outside my hotel, I happened upon the following "Platz" (meaning "place" or "plaza"):

[photo credit: yours truly]

Was it fate? Who knows? All we know is that we're excited and proud to be bringing Benjamin's extraordinary body of work to English-language readers. We've had quite a run during the last year or so with Berlin Childhood around 1900, On Hashish, and The Writer of Modern Life: Essays on Charles Baudelaire, and stay tuned for Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility: and Other Writings on Media, coming in November 2007.

On a related note, fans of the Frankfurt School should be excited to get their hands on our forthcoming biography of Theodor Adorno, currently scheduled for publication in September 2007. For now, you can satiate yourself by perusing Benjamin and Adorno's Complete Correspondence, available in paperback at the fabulously low price of $21.95.

P.S. Click "continue reading" for a picture of the "Platz" itself, complete with fountain ...

Washington Post "Best Nonfiction"

We're pleased to announce that George Hutchinson's In Search of Nella Larsen: A Biography of the Color Line has been selected by the Washington Post as one of the "Best Nonfiction" books of 2006. Our last two posts on the book noted the extraordinary praise it's received from all corners of the globe. Congratulations to Professor Hutchinson.

||| Read an excerpt from In Search of Nella Larsen.

Mao's Last Revolution Reviewed in TNR

Check out Andrew J. Nathan's fantastic review of Mao's Last Revolution in The New Republic (free registration required).

A few links...

A parting note for this week--check out David Kaufman's insightful review in the Forward of Berlin Childhood around 1900. After you're done, check out the first post in our series "A Stroll through Walter Benjamin's Berlin."

A stroll through Walter Benjamin's Berlin - Part 1 (Introduction)

NB: This post will be the first in an occasional series called "A stroll through Walter Benjamin's Berlin."

The release last November of Walter Benjamin's Berlin Childhood around 1900 gives English-speaking readers the opportunity to savor Benjamin's reflections on the city of his birth--a city that in a few short years (Benjamin wrote Berlin Childhood during the 1930s) would collapse into rubble. Reading the introduction (more on that in a second), it becomes clear that Benjamin sensed the passing of an era; with Berlin Childhood, he sought to preserve, at least in writing, some semblance of a Berlin that once was and that never would be again. For those inclined to ponder about history, about what was and what might have been, reading Berlin Childhood today can prove a harrowing experience, for after a while the people and places Benjamin evokes begin to feel like ghosts brought back to life. Indeed, one has to wonder if this was not Benjamin's intention, since he composed most of these vignettes abroad, having fled his beloved Berlin as the Nazis rose to power on a tide of anti-Semitic rhetoric that must have terrified the city's Jewish community, from whose culture and traditions Benjamin's sensibilities originally stem. As we travel through the Introduction, we'll see that Benjamin felt compelled to compose these short pieces as a sort of elegy for a time and a place gone by. As translator Howard Eiland aptly puts it in his forward to to this new volume:

Berlin Childhood around 1900 pivots on the threshold between the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries, memorializing a world that was about to disappear, not without marking its complicity with the unending brutality of the "victor," while glancing simultaneously backward to the heyday of the bourgeoisie and forward to the global crisis.

Before we enter the city let's first take a "stroll" through Benjamin's short introduction, composed in 1938, in which he lays out in concise prose his reasons for undertaking this unique project:

In 1932, when I was abroad, it began to be clear to me that I would soon have to bid a long, perhaps lasting farewell to the city of my birth.

Several times in my inner life, I had already experienced the process of inoculation as something salutary. In this situation, too, I resolved to follow suit, and I deliberately called to mind those images, which, in exile, are most apt to waken homesickness: images of childhood. My assumption was that the feeling of longing would no more gain mastery over my spirit than a vaccine does over a healthy body. I sought to limit its effect through insight into the irretrievability--not the contingent biographical but the necessary social irretrievability--of the past.

From the beginning we can see that Berlin Childhood is going to be a very personal work for Benjamin--it arises not out of some abstract idea, but rather a personal need--the need to protect or "inoculate" himself against the awful homesickness of the exile. In an effort to ward off this disease, Benjamin has decided to play spiritual doctor to himself, administering the "vaccine" of memory so that he might be steeled against such longings in the rough days ahead (at this point, however, not even Benjamin could have known just how tough he would need to be). But the last sentence makes clear that it's not all about Benjamin; it's about a time, a place, a whole set of relationships between people that is gone and that can never be "retrieved."

Elaborating on this point, he continues:

This has meant that certain biographical features, which stand out more readily in the continuity of experience than in its depths, altogether recede in the present undertaking. And with them go the physiognomies--those of my family and comrades alike. On the other hand, I have made an effort to get hold of the images in which the experience of the big city is precipitated in a child of the middle class.

How does the city imprint itself on the mind of a child from that time and place? Benjamin believes that it is through the images it presents--its physical form. It is only through these images that a vanished Berlin can be conjured up once again, and it is with these images that Benjamin will seek to "inoculate" himself. This focus on images has implications for the structure of Berlin Childhood, laid out as it is in a series of vignettes that taken together serve to "reconstruct" what living in Berlin must have been like for a middle-class Jewish boy around the turn of the century.

Continuing on the subject of images, Benjamin concludes his introduction:

I believe it possible that a fate expressly theirs is held in reserve for such images. No customary forms await them yet, like those that, over the course of centuries, and in obedience to a feeling for nature, answer to remembrances of a childhood set in the country. But, then, the images of my metropolitan childhood perhaps are capable, at their core, of preforming later historical experience. I hope they will at least suggest how thoroughly the person spoken of here would later dispense with the security allotted his childhood.

What other writers have done for the country, Benjamin seeks to do for the city. As an adult, frequently on the run from the Nazis, Benjamin looks back at what must have seemed an impossibly idyllic time and place. In the pages that follow, he will preserve the images of that lost era, in the process constructing one of the greatest and most complex documents of city life ever produced.

Over the coming weeks we'll accompany Benjamin on his travels through the lost Berlin of his youth. As the quintessential flaneur of his generation, we're sure he would approve.

||| Read an excerpt from Berlin Childhood around 1900.

Notable American Women--Jackie Kennedy

Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis was born on this day in 1929. Here's what our Notable American Women: A Biographical Dictionary: Completing the Twentieth Century has to say about this extraordinary figure:

ONASSIS, Jacqueline Lee Bouvier Kennedy. July 28, 1929–May 19, 1994. First Lady, reporter, editor.

Jacqueline Lee Bouvier was born in Southhampton, Long Island, the first child of Janet Lee and John “Black Jack” Vernou Bouvier III. Her younger sister, Caroline Lee, was born March 3, 1933, and the sisters shared an intense intimacy and rivalry throughout their lives. Her parents both came from elite, wealthy New York families, whose earlier generations had not been above embellishing their lineages to ease their acceptance into society. This illusion of noble ancestry, fabricated by both families, enhanced Jacqueline’s sense of the dramatic and her instinctive understanding of the power of an image, which she used to advantage in crafting her own image as First Lady.

Jacqueline inherited her beauty from her father, an extraordinarily handsome man. A magnet for scores of women throughout his life, his sexual attractiveness was matched only by his self-indulgence. His myriad affairs led to a failed marriage with Janet; they divorced in 1940. Her parents’ angry quarrels developed Jacqueline’s ability to tune out unpleasant things—a skill she would employ in her own marriages—and her penchant to escape into literature, art, fantasy, and horses. Her parents’ divorce left her with deep insecurities and a gnawing emptiness that haunted her, fueling her needs to purchase extravagantly and to marry men of wealth.

On June 21, 1942, her mother married the wealthy, twice-divorced stockbroker Hugh D. Auchincloss II, heir to a Standard Oil fortune. Jacqueline and Lee resided with them at Auchincloss’s two comfortable estates, Merrywood in McLean, Virginia, and Hammersmith Farm in Newport, Rhode Island. Janet’s second marriage gained her and her daughters unlimited access to polite society and produced two half siblings, Janet (1945) and James (1947). Jacqueline’s combined families provided a powerful social network that she utilized successfully throughout her life.

Jacqueline Bouvier was educated at Miss Chapin’s in New York and Holton-Arms in Washington, D.C., where she displayed extraordinary intelligence and an artistic and literary prowess. At fifteen, she enrolled in Miss Porter’s School in Farmington, Connecticut. She entered Vassar in 1947 and spent her junior year abroad at the Sorbonne in Paris, cultivating her love of French culture and language and traveling extensively in Europe. She completed her education at George Washington University, graduating in 1951.

Her interest in publishing began that year when she won Vogue’s Prix de Paris contest; the prize was a year’s apprenticeship as junior editor at the magazine’s offices in Paris and New York. Instead she decided to seek a job as “Inquiring Photographer” at the Washington Times Herald, a position she secured with the help of her stepfather.

In 1951, she met John Fitzgerald Kennedy, then a Massachusetts congressman about to run for the Senate, and they began a courtship in 1952. Their wedding took place in Newport, Rhode Island, on September 12, 1953. Jacqueline deeply loved her husband; his first love was politics. His constant womanizing brought tension and pain to the relationship, but conditioned by her own father’s example, she appears to have accepted this behavior as a part of the marriage. She ignored all but his most blatant infidelities, which continued until his death.

After suffering a miscarriage in 1955, she delivered a stillborn baby girl in 1956. Daughter Caroline Bouvier Kennedy was born November 27, 1957, and son John Fitzgerald Kennedy Jr. on November 25, 1960. Despite her discomfort with politics, she had campaigned with her husband during his presidential bid in 1960 until pregnancy curtailed her activities. A third child, Patrick Bouvier Kennedy, was born August 7, 1963; his death of hyaline membrane disease on August 9, caused intense grief for both parents.

After her husband’s inauguration as the nation’s thirty-fifth president, Jacqueline Kennedy’s exceptional knowledge of art, history, and literature gave her the self-assurance to undertake the restoration of the executive mansion. Her families’ social and political connections provided her with the personal access to accomplish her goal. Bringing together a prestigious Fine Arts Committee of art historians, antiques experts, and directors of leading American galleries and museums, she directed a restoration of the White House that filled the house with historic furniture, portraits, and fine period antiques. On February 14, 1962, she presented the restored White House to a nationwide audience of fifty million viewers in a historic, hour long tour with Charles Collingwood on CBS television. She established the White House Historical Association to continue the mansion’s preservation and successfully promoted legislation that established the White House as a national historic site under the National Park Service.

Both John and Jacqueline Kennedy possessed an elegance of mind and manner, but she especially understood the connection between pomp and power, ceremony and compelling historical drama. Her exquisite taste recast the image of the White House as a brilliant stage on which her husband conducted politics and diplomacy, and where leading artists highlighted American cultural achievements. At these events the First Lady deftly lobbied the artists to press her husband for the creation of a cabinet position for arts and culture.

John Kennedy’s growing appreciation of her singular contributions to his presidency, and his recognition of her popularity, brought him to seek her help with campaigning, a move that shifted the dynamics of their marriage. She accompanied her husband on a pre-campaign foray to Dallas, Texas,
where Kennedy was assassinated on November 22, 1963. Having structured the image of his presidency, Jacqueline Kennedy now shaped the pageantry of his funeral, imbuing his tragic death with dignity in carefully orchestrated ceremonies. After his death, she further shaped his presidential legacy in an interview with author Theodore White, fixing the Kennedy administration in the American collective memory as “Camelot.”

Shattered by the assassination, the thirty-four year-old widow struggled with depression, with making a life for herself, and with bringing up her children as a single parent. Although she distanced herself from the Kennedy clan to raise her children with privacy and discipline, she instilled in them a fierce pride in their heritage. In September 1964, she relocated to New York City, where she directed her children’s schooling and worked on plans for the Kennedy Library. During this time, she was linked romantically with several prominent men.

The assassination of Robert F. Kennedy in 1968 intensified her fear for the safety of her children in the United States. She soon agreed to marry Aristotle “Ari” Onassis, a Greek shipping tycoon, whose wealth provided her and her children with a secure life. However, her remarriage on the Greek island of Skorpios in October 1968 shattered her iconic status with the American public, and the couple’s initial delight in each other soured. She increasingly spent time with her children in New York City, and he resumed his affair with his longtime mistress, opera singer Maria Callas. Evidence suggests that Onassis planned to divorce his wife, but he died from myasthenia gravis in 1975 without having signed divorce papers. She inherited $20 to $26 million from the Onassis estate.

After his death, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis returned to New York to carve out a life on her own. She resumed her publishing career, first as an editor at Viking Press and then, starting in 1978, as a senior editor at Doubleday. She edited a number of prestigious books and brought noted authors and their works to the press.

Now past fifty, she found happiness in a personal relationship with diamond merchant Maurice Tempelsman, whom she had known from Democratic campaigns since the late 1950s. Later he became her financial adviser. In 1982, he moved into her New York apartment, where they lived together until her death from non-Hodgkins lymphoma on May 19, 1994, at the age of sixty-four. She is buried beside President Kennedy at Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia.

Jacqueline Kennedy’s beauty, glamour, and clothing made her a widely emulated fashion icon. So close was the bond she forged with the American people that the First Lady was always referred to by the familiar and affectionate name "Jackie" until the end of her life. Her significance in American history rests with her role in historic preservation and in structuring the image of the Kennedy presidency, funeral, and legacy. Her White House restoration and unique entertainments, highlighting the vitality of the nation’s artistic achievement, promoted an American cultural hegemony that accompanied the country’s postwar economic and military might. After her tenure, no presidential spouse could be a successful First Lady without a significant national project. Her time in the White House marked a watershed in redefining the First Lady’s role in the last half of the twentieth century.*

By Edith May

That's just one of the 500 entries included in Notable American Women: A Biographical Dictionary: Completing the Twentieth Century, the volume that brings Harvard's Notable American Women project up-to-date through the end of the 20th century. It's an indispensible reference work that no one interested in American history should be without.

Read a significant excerpt from the book, including the Preface, Introduction, several entries and an index containing the names of all subjects.

* Copyright 2004 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. All rights reserved.

Solving the Mystery of Nella Larsen

Who was Nella Larsen, the mystery woman of the Harlem Renaissance?

Born in Chicago into a bi-racial family, she traveled to Denmark, worked as a nurse, was the first black female graduate of a library school, wrote two of the major novels of the Harlem Renaissance, Quicksand and Passing, and was the first black woman to receive a Guggenheim Fellowship. In his new biography, In Search of Nella Larsen: A Biography of the Color Line, George Hutchinson investigates the disputed and as yet unknown events of Larsen's life as well as the pervasive color line thinking that has influenced previous biographies of her. Yesterday the Washington Post Book World called Hutchinson's book "brilliant" and "a definitive biography."

Who is George Hutchinson? In the process of writing In Search of Nella Larsen he became "a detective, a real estate appraiser, a fire marshal, a genealogist, a snoop, and a legal aide." Read more about this sleuth and his remarkable discoveries in his interview with Lindsay Waters, Harvard University Press Executive Editor for the Humanities.