Life Sketches by John Hersey

Author:John Hersey
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2019-09-03T16:00:00+00:00

ALFRED KNOPF IN PARADISE

“I never suspected this stuff existed. I’m never going to Europe again.”

In the meanwhile, several people connected with the Park Service had been making suggestions as to who should write the book Alfred wanted to publish; and De Voto, a member of the National Park Service’s Advisory Board on National Parks, Historic Sites, Buildings, and Monuments, had also been consulted. Almost everyone agreed that the best possible candidate would be Freeman Tilden, author of A World in Debt, who was thoroughly familiar with the parks and had done some writing about them. By the next June, Tilden had signed a contract for the book. Its preparation took more than a year. “Although I have met Alfred occasionally over the years of my writing,” Tilden writes, “the Parks book is the first on which he has been my publisher. So far as I am concerned, Knopf the Publisher is a man of few words. An instance: when this Parks book was finally from the printer and he showed me a copy in his office, I said, ‘This is certainly a beautiful book.’ He said, ‘Yes, too beautiful.’ I gave way to thoughts one day, in his sanctum, that I foresaw, as a concomitant of the book I was doing, that it might be the basis of a supplementary reading book for the grade schools. He said, with neither sourness nor sweetness, ‘Maybe you had better finish this one first.’ He is the first publisher I ever had who never uttered a saccharine word to me: I incline now to think that is the basis for the best relations between writer and publisher. Anyway, I like it so.” And in the end Alfred liked Tilden’s book; he read the manuscript, he wrote Drury, “with great interest and great pleasure.”

In the summer of 1949, Alfred was not able to get away on a trip to the parks. In June, however, he met Horace Albright, now president of U.S. Potash Company, who was many years ago Superintendent of Yellowstone and who preceded Newton Drury as Director of the Park Service; the resulting friendship intensified Alfred’s interest in the parks. Through Albright, Alfred eventually arranged for the publication of a second book on the parks, a biography of Stephen T. Mather, the pioneering spirit in the founding of the national parks, by Robert Shankland. By the next spring, the Knopfs were off again—to Natchez Trace Parkway and, on the way back, the Blue Ridge Parkway. On June 12th, the Secretary of the Interior, Oscar Chapman, wrote a formal letter to Alfred inviting him to join the Advisory Board on National Parks, Historic Sites, Buildings, and Monuments of the National Park Service. Accepting delightedly and as formally as he could, Alfred could not resist adding this note to the Secretary: “I know how busy you are, but I hope you will find time at least to glance at a book which my office sent you a while back—America’s New Frontier, by Professor Morris E.

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