Among the Literati

Horace Liveright is working assiduously on his autobiography, which Simon & Schuster threaten to publish when finished. How assiduously he is working can be ascertained from the report that the gray-haired, eagle-beaked publisher has already done some 68,000 words and hasn’t yet reached that point of his career when he became a publisher. An unconfirmed rumor is about to the effect that Liveright has been offered an eight-weeks Hollywood contract at more than believable dollars per week. . . .

Tom Stix, who once ran the now defunct “Book League of America” and who has been actively preparing a weekly radio broadcast cunningly called “America’s Grub Street,” is about to launch a bridge-game book project under the publishing banner of Long & Smith. Willard Kahn, eminent bridge authority, is the star around which the project will revolve.

Flying from New York, where she was awaiting the publication of her novel “The Journey”, Rose Caylor went to Hollywood to meet her husband, Ben Hecht, whose South American cruise was interrupted at Panam City by a wire to report to Hollywood.

All cuts were rescinded at Simon & Schuster’s. Employees are now back on the 1929 wage scale. The firm had an unusually successful season with such books as “Little Man, What Now?”, “The First World War” and Van Loon’s “Geography.”

Clifton Fadiman, book reviewer for The New Yorker and editor for Simon & Schuster, is so near-sighted that he is accused of being a snob. As yet he has not written a book but he is at work on a volume of critical essays and estimates of modern American authors. Always hatless, his wavy pompadour above his glasses gives him an air of being in a hurry. He looks like an assistant professor of English in a labor college. He was brought up in Brooklyn and his first name wasn’t always Clifton. He is one of the best of the younger publishing editors and a very shrewd critic.

Konrad Bercovici is one of America’s most “arty” looking authors. His thick black hair, generous mustache, swarthy complexion and taste for colorful clothes sets him apart from the common run of men. He has been writing about gypsies for so many years that he looks a little like one. A talented musician, he has that means of livelihood if his fund of stories ever runs out. He is intensely interested in Jewish affairs and a confirmed public speaker. His only novel dealing with Jews, “Main Entrance,” was the least successful of his twenty published books. He lives on an estate in Connecticut and has four grown children. He was once a newspaper reporter.

Fannie Hurst is one of the most persistent seekers—and one of the most successful getters—of newspaper space in the writing profession. There is little about her personal life that is not known. Even her somewhat strange habit of keeping a separate establishment from her husband with whom she lives in harmony was grist for the rotary presses. Miss Hurst is a joiner of movements and almost a chronic protestor. Few lists are compiled of people who are protesting against this or that, or are in favor of that or this, which do not contain her name. She is a large woman, heavy set, black haired and very serious, a quality that makes for good newspaper copy.