Correspondence: Publishers, 1944-1975

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Hannah Arendt was a highly productive writer, scholar, and public intellectual. She wrote throughout her adult lifetime, beginning in Germany, and worked with many types of publishers. After her arrival in the United States in 1941 as a refugee from Nazi-occupied Europe, she learned English and worked as a freelance writer, writing at first in German with English translation. With Salo Baron’s help, she published essays on anti-Semitism in the early 1940s in periodicals like Jewish Social Studies, the Menorah Journal, and Partisan Review. From 1946 to 1948 she worked as an editor for Schocken Books, a publishing house that was originally founded in Berlin in 1931 and re-established in New York in 1945. During that time she was also drafting The Origins of Totalitarianism, which she published in the American edition with Harcourt Brace & Co. in 1951 and also in British and German editions. As her independent teaching and writing career progressed, her major books were published in both English and German. R. Piper & Co Verlag became her ongoing publisher for German editions. Arendt also edited works in both languages. Periodicals in which she published her reviews and essays, or who commissioned her for articles, included The American Scholar, the New York Review of Books, and The New Yorker.

This file of correspondence involving Arendt’s interactions with publishers includes letters, some with enclosures, sent to and from publishing firms and editors of periodicals. The materials are arranged alphabetically by name of magazine, journal, or publisher and chronologically thereunder. This project involves correspondence and dealings with publishers only. Arendt’s draft writings of book manuscripts and periodical pieces, lectures, and etc., are located in a different part of the Hannah Arendt Papers collection.

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