Harvard University Press Blog

Oscar Handlin, 1915-2011

Oscar Handlin—a distinguished historian and a Harvard professor for nearly fifty years—passed away last week at 95. Handlin was the author of over 30 books, many of which were published by Harvard University Press. He also served on HUP’s Board of Directors, for awhile as its Chairman, and for a short time in 1972 he even served as acting Director of the Press, shepherding us through a particularly challenging period in our history.

Handlin is credited for pioneering American study of immigration. His first book, based on his Harvard dissertation under Arthur Schlesinger, entitled Boston’s Immigrants, 1790-1865, was published in 1941 as Number 50 in the Harvard Historical Studies series. In 1954 he was instrumental in the publication of The Harvard Guide to American History, along with such illustrious figures as Schlesinger, Samuel Eliot Morison, Frederick Merk, and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. Handlin’s best known book, for which he won a Pulitzer for history in 1952, is The Uprooted: The Epic Story of the Great Migrations That Made the American People.

As noted by the Boston Globe last week, Handlin was also a very effective teacher who leaves a lasting legacy: “Teaching was no less important to Dr. Handlin than writing or research. Many of the approximately 80 doctoral students he supervised went on to notable academic careers, among them Bernard Bailyn, Martin Baum Duberman, Sam Bass Warner, Stephan Thernstrom, and Richard Sennett.”

You can read more about Handlin’s life and work in his New York Times obituary.

More Memories of Daniel Bell

After Daniel Bell’s death late last month, Michael Aronson shared some of his memories of the man and their friendship. Below, HUP Executive Editor for the Humanities Lindsay Waters remembers Bell as a personal teacher who played a central role in shaping what Harvard University Press has become.

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I have lost in less than a year two great teachers whom I acquired since coming to the Harvard University Press. The first was Frank Kermode, whom I honored here a few months ago; the second is Dan Bell. Children think of teachers as adults, but I had trouble thinking of Dan as an adult, because he was always so feisty, always so filled with spunk, right to the end. He was not calm and reserved; he was always ready for an intellectual joust. He brought the feel of the lunch hall Alcove Number One of City College in New York City to ivied Harvard, to our Board of Syndics meetings, and to the many conversations we had around and between those. The Board is a rotating group of senior Harvard faculty that is the last hurdle that every HUP project must clear, and having Dan as a member made HUP’s then-Director Arthur Rosenthal feel at home. It ensured that no meeting would be dull, and that we attending would not be choked by ivy the way the laurel strangles Daphne creeping up her every limb. Arthur trusted Dan to protect the Harvard Press from “qvatch,” which is, as Dan told me, “a good Berliner term for which the only honest equivalent is crap.”

Dan was my adversary and my advocate on the Board. Arthur hired me to publish books like Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. When I came on board, I was able to link up with Helen Vendler at once because we both loved poetry most of all. But Dan was different. Dan hated intellectuals like Heidegger who supported Adolf Hitler. He had a feel for the “cultural contradictions of capitalism,” to state the name of one of his most powerful books, one I studied at Minnesota with my friend Schulte-Sasse. I said “feel,” and “feel” is an important word here, because however much his genius as a sociologist came from his ability to perceive and imagine empirical structures, he took that genius to a new level that subsumed (yes, yes, in a way best designated by the fancy but irresistible Hegelian term “aufhebung”) one structure into another. This feeling at its most vital and delicate is what Dan described as a certain ability to perceive the smallest changes in society on your fingertips. He had a German world for it: “fingerspitzengefühl.” What I am saying is that he was a romantic, even though he said he was a cultural conservative. In other words, he was riven by the very same contradictions he made central to his analysis of modern society. This is why we worked so well together despite our constant sparring. In wrestling with him, I was wrestling with my angel and I felt the presence of god not just in Dan but in the struggle itself, which is why it is so sad that it’s over. But let me tell you what good we wrought working with our colleagues here at the Press and on the Board of Syndics.

The distinguished German publisher Siegfried Unseld (head of Suhrkamp Verlag) came one day from Frankfurt to Cambridge to see Arthur and me to bring me a plan for a comprehensive but nonetheless selective edition of the writings of Walter Benjamin. The list of what Unseld thought needed to be in what would have to be a multi-volume work was extensive. My postmodernist friends, the ones who liked Heidegger, had introduced me to Benjamin. To gather firepower to win the Syndics discussion of the Benjamin, I turned to the then Harvard art historian T.J. Clark, and he wrote a great review of the plans for the edition. But when we got to the Syndics meeting I was overwhelmed by worry. How could the august Syndics approve the publication of volumes of a man whose dissertation at the University of Frankfurt was turned down? Who was this schlemiel Walter Benjamin, the little rag-picker? How could publishing thousands of pages of this slacker-dude’s essays and notebooks be grand enough for Harvard University Press? Before the meeting I’d done no lobbying of the Syndics. At the meeting an inevitable question arose: “OK, he sounds like an impressive critic and thinker, but why do we have to publish thousands of pages of his work?” And Dan answered without a pause: “Because he is a critic, and he’s not a theorist. If he were a theorist, he’d have presented his ideas systematically, and we could publish a well-chosen selection of his work that would represent his thinking beautifully, but he’s a critic, not a theorist, which means his ideas are scattered across all the pages of his work, and the only way to publish his work adequately is to publish hundreds and hundreds of pages of it so readers can see how his ideas emerge as he gets caught up in analyzing hundreds of concrete situations.” Arthur was convinced and the Board was convinced, and we have now published about three thousand pages of Benjamin’s writings, including an edition this spring of his Early Writings, 1910-1917. I could not have done it without Dan. Arthur would not have been convinced, nor would the Syndics have been. The trust between Arthur and Dan went way back. And they both trusted me already—I’d only been at the Press for two years when we solidified this plan—in ways that seem miraculous and beautiful to me still. We did this, and we did it right, working all together. And after Arthur departed, Bill Sisler and Aida Donald supported the meticulous editing of Maria Ascher and Howard Eiland, because they saw, as Aida told me, that we’d be judged forever as a Press if we screwed this job up. And if we did it right, we’d earn eternal glory.

Remembering Daniel Bell

We at Harvard University Press were saddened last week by the death of Daniel Bell, who for many years helped to steer the Press as a member of our Board of Syndics. In the space below, Michael Aronson, HUP Senior Editor for Social Sciences, shares some of his memories of Bell and their time together. In the coming days we’ll hear as well from Lindsay Waters.  (UPDATE: Lindsay Waters’ piece is now posted here.)

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Daniel Bell, who died on January 25th, was one of the great sociologists and public intellectuals of the twentieth century. He came to Harvard from Columbia University in 1969, joined our Board of Syndics in the early ’80s and stayed, as I recall, until he became professor emeritus in 1990. He was a wonderful member of the board, able to comment perceptively on many manuscripts outside his specialty, and with a keen sense of the market. He also knew how important a good title was, and was always coming up with suggestions for improving them. He encouraged us to publish unusual and daring books, including Greil Marcus’s Lipstick Traces. He also strongly supported the Walter Benjamin Project. I often thought that if he hadn’t been an outstanding social thinker, he would have been a great publisher. Indeed, successful publishers, including Jeremiah Kaplan, Arthur Rosenthal, Erwin Glikes, and Martin Kessler sought out and followed his advice and suggestions about books and authors in building their lists. (I believe he suggested to Steven Weinberg that he should write what became the classic The First Three Minutes.)

Dan’s parents were immigrant garment workers in New York. His father died when he was only 8 months old, leaving his mother with two small children. Dan grew up with a fierce love of books and learning. He told me that in the 1930s he read many novels, especially French novels by Georges Bernanos, Romain Roland, Jules Roy, and others. A former student of Dan’s told me there was a connection between his love of books and his penchant for wearing sweaters. As a youth he could not afford to buy books, so he spent a lot of time in public libraries, which were often cold.

I didn’t get to know Dan well until he retired. Partly that was due to my earlier positivist view of social science and my being unduly impressed with quantitative approaches, which were not his “shtick.” Under his tutelage, my views broadened and I came to believe that history and a good stock of knowledge were crucial to understanding the social world. We would go out to dinner at Legal Seafoods or S&S Deli and talk about the Russian Revolution, Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman (I was hoping to give him a copy of Prison Blossoms later this spring), the trials of Alger Hiss and the Rosenbergs, which were big events in my youth. Being a staunch anti-communist, he kidded me about my leftist background and ties with people who got into trouble with Congressional investigating committees in the late ’40s and ’50s. (At the time, it was no laughing matter.)

“What takes place in our mind, in our soul, when we read a novel?” – An Excerpt from Orhan Pamuk’s The Naive and the Sentimental Novelist

 In the fall of 2009 the Nobel Prize-winning Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk held Harvard University’s Charles Eliot Norton Professorship in Poetry, following the likes of Italo Calvino, John Cage, and Jorge Luis Borges. During his stay Pamuk delivered the customary six Norton lectures, from which he later produced a book, The Naive and the Sentimental Novelist, which we published this past fall. In the following excerpt, taken from a section titled “What Our Minds Do When We Read Novels,” Pamuk describes the quickened mind and piercing focus of his youthful novel reading.

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I have been reading novels for forty years. I know there are many stances we can adopt toward the novel, many ways in which we commit our soul and mind to it, treating it lightly or seriously. And in just the same manner, I have learned by experience that there are many ways to read a novel. We read sometimes logically, sometimes with our eyes, sometimes with our imagination, sometimes with a small part of our mind, sometimes the way we want to, sometimes the way the book wants us to, and sometimes with every fiber of our being. There was a time in my youth when I completely dedicated myself to novels, reading them intently—even ecstatically. During those years, from the age of eighteen to the age of thirty (1970 to 1982), I wanted to describe what went on in my head and in my soul the way a painter depicts with precision and clarity a vivid, complicated, animated landscape filled with mountains, plains, rocks, woods, and rivers.

What takes place in our mind, in our soul, when we read a novel? How do such interior sensations differ from what we feel when we watch a film, look at a painting, or listen to a poem, even an epic poem? A novel can, from time to time, provide the same pleasures that a biography, a film, a poem, a painting, or a fairy tale provides. Yet the true, unique effect of this art is fundamentally different from that of other literary genres, film, and painting. And I can perhaps begin to show this difference by telling you about the things I used to do and the complex images awakened within me while I was passionately reading novels in my youth.

Just like the museum visitor who first and foremost wants the painting he’s gazing at to entertain his sense of sight, I used to prefer action, conflict, and richness in landscape. I enjoyed the feeling of both secretly observing an individual’s private life and exploring the dark corners of the general vista. But I don’t wish to give you the impression that the picture I held within me was always a turbulent one. When I read novels in my youth, sometimes a broad, deep, peaceful landscape would appear within me. And sometimes the lights would go out, black and white would sharpen and then separate, and the shadows would stir. Sometimes I would marvel at the feeling that the whole world was made of a quite different light. And sometimes twilight would pervade and cover everything, the whole universe would become a single emotion and a single style, and I would understand that I enjoyed this and would sense that I was reading the book for this particular atmosphere. As I was slowly drawn into the world within the novel, I would realize that the shadows of the actions I had performed before opening the pages of the novel, sitting in my family’s house in Beóiktaó in Istanbul—the glass of water I had drunk, the conversation I’d had with my mother, the thoughts which had passed through my mind, the small resentments I had harbored—were slowly fading away.

The Science and the Personal Stories Behind the AIDS Epidemic in Africa

This past spring, we published a powerful and important new book on the AIDS crisis in Botswana. Co-written by Unity Dow, a novelist and the first woman Justice to serve on Botswana’s High Court, and Max Essex, Chair of the Harvard AIDS Initiative, Saturday Is for Funerals uniquely presents the heartbreaking personal stories of lives ravaged by the disease. But the book also describes the dramatic progress that Botswana has made in fighting the epidemic. Indeed, in the year 2000 the World Health Organization estimated that 85 percent of fifteen-year-olds in Botswana would eventually die of AIDS. Now, ten years later, Dow and Essex explain why that won’t happen. 

In the following video, produced by the Harvard School of Public Health AIDS Initiative, Max Essex describes the book’s genesis. “I was looking for a book that explores both the science and the personal stories behind the AIDS epidemic in Africa,” he says. “That book didn’t exist. So I decided to fill that void.”

Dow and Essex discussed the book last May at the Harvard Book Store.  The WGBH Forum website has footage of the event.

Murty family donates $5.2 million to establish library of Indian classical literature

Exciting news - we're ready to announce the establishment, via an extraordinary gift from the Murty family of Bangalore, of a new series dedicated to making the literary heritage of India available to English-language readers. The series is called the Murty Classical Library of India — first volumes to be be published in 2013. The text of the press release follows.

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HARVARD ANNOUNCES NEW MURTY CLASSICAL LIBRARY OF INDIA SERIES

Cambridge, MA — Harvard University and Harvard University Press (HUP) announced today that the Murty family of Bangalore, India, has established a new publication series, the Murty Classical Library of India, with a generous gift of $5.2 million. The dual-language series aims both to serve the needs of the general reading public and to enhance scholarship in the field.

Harvard Provost Steven E. Hyman noted that the Murty family gift would enable HUP to present the literary cultures of India to a global readership in an unprecedented manner. “The Murty Classical Library of India will make the classical heritage of India accessible worldwide for generations to come,” said Hyman. “We are truly grateful to the Murty family for their vision and leadership in making this historic initiative a reality.”

The Murty family’s endowed series aims to bring the classical literature of India, much of which remains locked in its original language, to a global audience, making many works available for the first time in English and showcasing the contributions of Indian literature to world civilization. Narayana Murty said of the new series, “I am happy that Harvard University Press is anchoring this publishing project.” His wife, Sudha, agreed. “We are happy to participate in this exciting project of bringing the rich literary heritage of India to far corners of the world.”

Under the direction of General Editor Sheldon Pollock, William B. Ransford Professor of Sanskrit and Indian Studies at Columbia University, and aided by an international editorial board composed of distinguished scholars, translators will provide contemporary English versions of works originally composed in Bengali, Gujarati, Kannada, Marathi, Persian, Punjabi, Sanskrit, Tamil, Telugu, Urdu, and other Indian languages.

Each volume will present the English translation with the original text in the appropriate Indic script on the facing page. The books will be supplemented by scholarly introductions, expert commentary, and textual notes, all with the goal of establishing Murty Classical Library volumes as the most authoritative editions available.

The Murty family’s vision has already begun to impress notable scholars, such as Thomas W. Lamont University Professor and professor of economics and philosophy at Harvard University, Amartya Sen, who expressed his appreciation for the initiative. “There are few intellectual gaps in the world that are as glaring as the abysmal ignorance of Indian classics in the Western world. It is wonderful that the Murty Classical Library of India is taking up the challenge of filling this gap, through a new commitment of the Harvard University Press, backed by the discerning enthusiasm of the Murty family, and the excellent leadership of Sheldon Pollock—an outstanding Sanskritist and classical scholar. This will be a big contribution to advancing global understanding that is so much needed in the world today.”

HUP plans to make the works available in both print and digital formats. The first volumes are scheduled for publication in fall 2013. An Indian edition is being planned.

Founded in 1913, Harvard University Press is a major publisher of nonfiction, scholarly, and general interest books with offices in Cambridge, Massachusetts, New York, and London.

Brand new HUP website!

Great news today - HUP has a brand new website! It's the result of many months of hard work on the part of our colleagues, so we congratulate them. In addition to the appealing design sense, new features include improved browsing and search capability, simpler ordering, and a new ease in discovering the many treasures of our backlist.

Here's what the front page looks like:

But the best way to get a taste is to browse yourself - just click here or point your browser to http://www.hup.harvard.edu.

Pamuk delivers first Norton lecture; five more to come

The Charles Eliot Norton Professorship in Poetry was endowed in 1925 by C. C. Stillman to honor the university's first Professor of the History of Art. In accordance with Stillman's desire that "the term Poetry shall be interpreted in the broadest sense, including, together with Verse, all poetic expression in Language, Music, or the Fine Arts," Norton Professors have included not just poets in the narrower sense, but novelists, critics, musicians, and accomplished polymaths of all stripes, including Umberto Eco, John Cage, Leonard Bernstein, Octavio Paz, Italo Calvino, Northrop Frye, Lionel Trilling, Jorge Luis Borges, R. Buckminster Fuller, E. E. Cummings, Thornton Wilder, and a host of others.

And so Nobel Prize-winning Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk delivered the first of his Norton lectures yesterday afternoon in Harvard's Sanders Theater. Pamuk, the author of The White Castle, The Black Book, My Name is Red, Snow, Istanbul: Memories and the City, The Museum of Innocence, and many others, spoke primarily of what makes the novel a unique form and how we are to determine what happens to our minds as we read them. Pamuk, who started out as a painter, elaborated on Schiller's distinction between the naive and the reflective poet as it applies to his own experience with novels, both the Turkish ones he read in his youth (he once "raged" against those naive, unselfconscious storytellers as Schiller raged against the serene, untroubled genius of Goethe) as well as the classics that have shaped him as a novelist and as a person (Anna Karenina is his all-time favorite, we learn; he quoted extensively from the passage where Anna reads an English novel on the train back to St. Petersburg). He offered as well a set of nine points on what distinguishes the novel from other forms, the last and most forceful of which being that novels offer (and we seek in them) "a secret center," a buried object that we feel compelled to search out via clues in the narrative. This, of course, provoked questions about where exactly lies the periphery and how are we to locate that bit (hey, it's an audience of academics!), which Pamuk, a self-described autodidact, promised to address in future lectures.

The lectures, we should point out, are free and open to the public, and there are five more coming; here's the schedule, courtesy of the Humanities Center (each lecture begins at 4pm):

Norton Lectures: Orhan Pamuk on "The Naive and the Sentimental Novelist"

Tuesday, September 22 - "What Happens to Us as We Read Novels"

Tuesday, September 29 - "Mr. Pamuk, Did You Really Live All of This?"

Tuesday, October 13 - "Character, Time, Plot"

Tuesday, October 20 - "Pictures and Things"

Monday, October 26 - "Museums and Novels"

Tuesday, November 3 - "The Center"

||| Norton Lectures at the Humanities Center (PDF link)

Barbara Johnson remembered

The renowned literary critic and many-time HUP author Barbara Johnson died on August 27. Johnson was Professor of English and Comparative Literature and the Fredric Wertham Professor of Law and Psychiatry in Society at Harvard, and the author of numerous books, including Defigurations du langage poetique, The Critical Difference, A World of Difference, The Wake of Deconstruction, The Feminist Difference, Mother Tongues, and her latest book, Persons and Things, published last year. Johnson's groundbreaking theoretical contributions to the study of literature made her one of the most respected critical minds of her generation, and her scholarship helped to establish the importance of structuralist and poststructuralist perspectives as central to contemporary inquiry into literary meaning. Below is a personal reflection on Johnson and the significance of her life and work by HUP Executive Editor for the Humanities Lindsay Waters, who had the good fortune to work with Johnson on several important projects over the years.

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On Barbara Johnson

Before I was offered a job at HUP in 1983, I had fairly deep connections with a number of Harvard professors—Hilary Putnam, Stanley Cavell, Werner Sollors, Roman Jakobson, Helen Vendler, Barbara Lewalski. I had never met Barbara Johnson, but we had one key friend in common—Paul de Man. I was publishing de Man’s books at Minnesota. So, when I was offered the job, I made a return trip back to Cambridge to size things up once more. I saw just a few people on campus, including Barbara, whom I spoke with for the first time. My question to her in a nutshell was: "Is it safe to work here?" By then I knew Yale a little, but Harvard not at all except for a memorable visit to Jakobson in 1979. These schools seem to be as convoluted as the Vatican, but I was raised in the bosom of the Roman Catholic Church, and such East Coast schools and the Pentagon share something of the Byzantine structure of the Vatican, so I was not totally ignorant of complex social structures. It was December 1983, days before de Man would die. Barbara's answer to my question was "yes." She had just moved from Yale to Harvard the previous year, so she knew whereof she spoke.

Some months after I got here, HUP's director, Arthur Rosenthal—one of the greatest American publishers in the era after World War II and founder of Basic Books—suggested to President Derek Bok that Barbara be appointed to HUP's Board of Syndics, and together Barbara and I got a chance to discover whether it was safe to be at Harvard. Arthur liked to "mix things up" in the world at large and in the little world around Harvard Yard. Bok supported him through thick and thin. I presented a number of projects to the Board of Syndics that led to what the Catholics call "baptism by fire" for Barbara and myself. She was ingenious, charming, indefatigable as a supporter of unusual projects of merit. But there were members of the Board who were allergic to certain names—"Heidegger," for instance—so any book having much to do with his ideas needed good reasons before we could win approval for it.

The Birds

No need to run shrieking in terror from the New York Times' fabulous slide show of images from Audubon: Early Drawings and Egg & Nest, our dual (but not dueling, we hope) bird books out this season. Previous coverage of Audubon on the blog here, and don't miss Rosamond Purcell, author/photographer of Egg & Nest, TONIGHT at the Harvard Museum of Natural History (6pm, directions). Purcell should be on your radar; check out these bona fides from none other than Jonathan Safran Foer: "What kind of genius is Rosamond Purcell? Is she an artist? A scholar? A documentarian? A living cabinet of wonders? Her originality defies category, as does her newest triumph, Egg & Nest. Crack its shell."

Image: Tippi Hedren & Co. make a run for it in a still from Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds (1963).