When we think of US modernist presses, a series of images comes to mind: Horace Liveright, who issued T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land alongside bestselling novels and popular theater plays; Alfred Knopf and his wife Blanche, who promoted the new African American literature and original crime fiction by Dashiell Hammett; B. W. Huebsch, who published Sherwood Anderson, James Joyce, and D. H. Lawrence, but also radical political texts. This chapter focuses on the diversity of American modernist presses – from avant-garde imprints to long-established houses, from limited editions to inexpensive reprints. The period between the wars has been mythologized as a “golden age.” This chapter scraps the gold to reveal a more nuanced picture of the publishing landscape. As Bennett Cerf (the owner of the Modern Library) declared, flamboyant but dysfunctional houses had no chance of surviving: publishing was a business, and the fun and excitement of discovering new authors would always compete with the necessity of making a profit.

The most celebrated literary figure of nineteenth-century New Orleans was George Washington Cable. From his early work on mixed-race mothers coping with their light-skinned daughters’ abilities to pass back and forth between white and black communities to his discovery and national dissemination via Scribner’s to his masterpiece, The Grandissimes, its hostile reception in Creole New Orleans, and Cable’s consequent departure from the city and then his final reconciliation: Cable’s life stands as the most literary life in the New Orleans of that era. Cable’s engagement with the issue of race presages some of the discourse surrounding the topic today, with his particular attention to institutional racism and the often subtle, even unconscious ways that racism is perpetuated in ordinary, daily life.