Introduction

Eric Seabrooke Pinker was born on 29 November 1891 in Chiswick, the eldest of the three children of James Brand Pinker and Mary Elizabeth Pinker (née Seabrooke). After attending St Edmund’s School in Surrey as a boarder, he was a student at Westminster School from September 1905 to December 1908. Pinker enlisted in the army in April 1914, several months before the outbreak of World War One, and he remained in service for nearly five years: in 1915, he served in Egypt, and was then in France from July 1916, receiving the Military Cross in January 1918. Around February 1919, Pinker entered his father’s firm, James B. Pinker and Son (for more information, please see my Introduction to James Brand Pinker in this volume, p. 445). On 19 May 1921, Pinker married Margit Vibege Watney and, after his father’s sudden death in February 1922, took over the business. All of KM’s letters to Eric Pinker were therefore written in the short period between James Pinker’s demise and her own death the following January. These letters, written in the clipped manner of business correspondence, show KM negotiating serial rights for her stories on both sides of the Atlantic, and her loyalty to Constable & Co. as her preferred publisher.

After KM’s death, Pinker continued to place her work in magazines across the American market, as evidenced in the extensive correspondence held in the firm’s archives at Northwestern University. In 1925, Eric’s younger brother, James Ralph Pinker, joined the family firm; in 1926, his wife filed for divorce, and Pinker married the American actress Adrienne Morrison the following year. After Pinker emigrated to the United States in 1930, leaving his brother James to run the London office as vice-president, he established a New York branch of the family firm (named J. B. Pinker and Son, Inc., while the London branch remained James B. Pinker and Son). At this point, the agency’s description changed to ‘Literary, Dramatic and Motion Picture (or Film) Agents’, and Pinker’s wife became an active partner in the business. The agency was hit hard by the financial depression of the 1930s, however, and both brothers responded by embezzling client funds. In March 1939, Eric Pinker was arrested in New York City on charges of grand larceny.