This obituary was originally published in the June 13, 1966 issue of Publishers Weekly.
Blanche Wolf Knopf, co-founder with her husband, Alfred A. Knopf, of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., and president of the company since 1957, died at her home in New York City on June 4 after a short illness. She was 71 years old. Besides her husband, she is survived by a son, Alfred A. Knopf, Jr., one of the partners of Atheneum Publishers, and three grandchildren.
On many occasions during her professional career, Mrs. Knopf expressed resentment that women were excluded from positions of importance in the "man's world" of American book publishing. Once, when a women's college invited her to speak about the future of women in publishing, she declined the invitation on the ground that there was "no future worth mentioning." Her several efforts to establish a female counterpart to the all-male Publishers Lunch Club were unsuccessful because, as she once told an interviewer, "There were never enough of us to make it work."
But as a sensitive editor, a shrewd student of belles lettres, a connoisseur of typography, paper, ink, printing and binding, an indefatigable world traveler and an accomplished hostess, Mrs. Knopf contributed greatly to broadening the perspectives and enriching the content of American book publishing over a 50-year span. A fluent linguist, she was responsible for much of the international flavor of Knopf lists. French writers she signed for the Knopf imprint included Andre Gide, Jules Remains, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir and Albert Camus. Mrs. Knopf first met Camus in Paris in June, 1945, and the relationship which developed between them was clearly Mrs. Knopf's most satisfying liaison with an author in her publishing career. "There were no fights; it was unique in that there was trust on both sides," she once told an interviewer. When Camus won the Nobel Prize in 1957, the Knopfs traveled to Stockholm to see him accept the prize. (He was the House of Knopf's eleventh Nobel Prize winner.) And when Camus died in 1961, Mrs. Knopf, in the Atlantic, wrote what must be one of the most emotional and yet most controlled accounts on record of a publisher-author relationship.
Her British writers included Hammond Innes, Elizabeth Bowen, Ivy Compton- Burnett, Muriel Spark, Angela Thirkell, Alan Sillitoe, and in the old days, Storm Jameson. She published the Russian writers Ilya Ehrenburg and Mikhail A. Sholokov. Among the many American writers she signed were Robert Nathan and Knopf's "Big Three" blood-and-guts writers: Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler and James M. Cain.
In 1915, Blanche Wolf encouraged her fiance, Alfred Knopf, who had just left the firm of Mitchell Kennerley, to start his own publishing house. When he did so, she went to work in the first Knopf office, located in the Candler Building. They were married the following year, and in 1918, when the firm was incorporated, Mrs. Knopf became a stockholder. "Her role then was, as it is now, practically that of a full partner," Geoffrey Hellman wrote in a 1948 New Yorker profile. It was Mrs. Knopf who suggested the borzoi as a colophon and the Knopfs at one time had a couple of borzois; the colophon lasted but not the Knopfs' affection for the breed, and in recent years Mrs. Knopf had a series of Yorkshires as pets.
The first Knopf lists were heavily European—particularly Russian—in origin, though this was soon tempered with the addition of American authors. In the firm's early years, the Knopfs maintained liaison with their European authors through correspondence, and it was not until 1921 that they made their first European trip as publishers. It was the Grand Tour: England, where they visited Conrad; France, where they signed up Gide; Germany and Scandinavia. "We had no trouble selling ourselves as young publishers," Mrs. Knopf once recalled of the 1921 trip. "In buying books, we stuck to our own tastes, the things we were interested in—much the same as we do today. But we bought sheets of too many expensive books—we didn't know any better."
The 1921 trip was the first of many. As the Knopfs' European travels became a regular part of their year, so did the publication of distinguished European authors under the Knopf imprint. When World War II shut down travel to the Continent, Mrs. Knopf made a pioneering scouting trip to South America ("Lima was exciting—full of spies," she said). She visited England during the war, and in 1945 she was in France and Germany not far behind the Allied occupying armies. In 1946, she saw some of the Nuremburg trials through the good offices of her friend Justice Robert H. Jackson.
France and Brazil honored Mrs. Knopf for her support of their literatures in the U.S. France named her a chevalier and later an officer in the Legion of Honor. In 1950, she was made a Cavaleiro of the Brazilian National Order of the Southern Cross, and in 1964 she was promoted to the rank of officer. She received an honorary Litt. D. degree from Franklin and Marshall College in 1962. Shortly before her death, she was given honorary doctorates by Adelphi University and Western College for Women. She was to have received, on June 17, the Constance Lindsay Skinner Award of the Women's National Book Association. The WNBA has now cancelled the Skinner Award dinner.
"The world of books is the world I know. I would not change it for any other," Mrs. Knopf once said. Despite her misgivings about the role of women in publishing, she remained essentially an optimist. The quality paperback revolution delighted her, in particular the thought that half a million students had purchased Camus' "The Stranger" in paperback. "I like people, I'm interested in them," was the way she summed up her findings on the occasion of the Knopf firm's 50th anniversary last year. "And I like writers whether they're published by us or by somebody else.
