The Lady with the Borzoi, written by Laura Claridge, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016

In 1915, Blanche Wolf and Alfred Knopf co-founded what would become one of the landmark publishing firms of New York City. Not long afterwards, Blanche and Alfred were married at the St. Regis hotel. At the time of their marriage—and forever afterwards—Blanche fervently believed she had been promised the status of an equal partner in the publishing firm. Alas, this belief was never fully reciprocated by her husband, nor her father-in-law, Sam Knopf, who persistently assumed a managerial as well as financial interest in Knopf publishing. By the way, the logo Blanche conceived for the publishing firm—a dashing Russian wolfhound, otherwise known as a borzoi—was inspired by her love of dogs. Hence the title of Laura Claridge’s meticulously researched biography which emphasizes Blanche’s flair for “spotting talent before the public was ready for it,” despite being distracted, more often than not, by the “habitual rancor” of marital discord.
In 1916, their first year in business, Alfred A. Knopf published twenty-nine books, most of which had originated in foreign countries. The next year, 1917, Alfred A. Knopf published thirty-seven books. In 1918, Blanche gave birth to a son named Pat. In the years that followed, Blanche, as the “primary scout,” concentrated, as much as she could, on recruiting talented authors while her husband focused his attention on sales. Their son, Pat, following military service during World War II, eventually developed Knopf’s paperback imprint, Vintage Books.
Authors who Blanche recruited over the years, and many of whom she befriended, included H. L. Mencken, Aldous Huxley, Rebecca West, D.H. Lawrence, Willa Cather, Thomas Mann, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Dashiell Hammett, Kahlil Gibran, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound, Clarence Darrow, Louise Bryant, John Reed, Sigmund Freud, James M. Cain, William Faulkner, Raymond Chandler, Muriel Spark, Ross Macdonald, Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, Elinor Wylie, Edward R. Murrow, John Hersey, Paul Gallico, MacKinlay Kantor and many others. Nobody in the history of publishing has ever been personally acquainted with more famous authors than Blanche Knopf.
In 1959, Pat Knopf, much to his parent’s distress, left the company and formed Atheneum Publishers. In 1960, Bennett Cerf of Random House offered Alfred and Blanche 3 million dollars for the “Knopf backlist” and Knopf later merged with Random House. Blanche and her husband celebrated a half century of publishing with a reception at the Hotel Astor on October 29, 1965. During their mutual tenure, twenty-seven writers at Knopf won the Pulitzer Prize and sixteen writers won the Nobel Prize. Blanche, following years of ailments, died on June 4, 1966 at the age of seventy-one.