B. W. Huebsch

Benjamin W. Huebsch (March 21, 1876 – August 7, 1964) was an American publisher in New York City in the early 20th century.

Background

Huebsch was the son of Rabbi Adolphus Huebsch, who had immigrated to the United States from Hungary in 1866 and died in New York, 1884. He played violin and studied under composer and pianist Sam Franko.

Career

Beginning work in his older brother's small print shop, which he gradually transformed into a publishing house.

B. W. Huebsch (1900–1924)

In 1900, Huebsch established the publishing house B. W. Huebsch. James Joyce's Dubliners (1916 ) and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916 ), and Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio (1919).

He also published Georges Sorel's Réflexions sur la violence (1908) as Reflections on Violence, translated by T. E. Hulme and published by Huebsch in 1914.

Circa January 1918, B. W. Huebsch published the book The Poets of Modern France by Ludwig Lewisohn, A.M., Litt.D., Professor at the Ohio State University. This is a translation of major French poets into English. Quoting from the Preface: "In every age the critical conservatives have protested in the name of eternal principles which, alas, are not eternal at all."

The Freeman magazine (1920–1924)

Huebsch published The Freeman magazine from 1920 to 1924.

Contributors included: Charles A. Beard, William Henry Chamberlin, Thomas Mann, Lewis Mumford, Bertrand Russell, Lincoln Steffens, Louis Untermeyer, Thorstein Veblen and Suzanne La Follette (the more Libertarian cousin of Senator Robert M. La Follette).

Viking Press (1925–1964) In 1925 he merged his publishing house with the Viking Press, where he worked as an editor and vice president.

At Viking, he published numerous German-speaking authors, including: Lion Feuchtwanger, Franz Werfel (though not Werfel's later controversial Class Reunion, published by Simon & Schuster in 1929 and translated by Whittaker Chambers ), Arnold Zweig, and Stefan Zweig.

Further authors he published included: Irwin Edman, Rumer Godden, William White, Patrick White.

Associations

Huebsch was a member of the Henry Ford Peace Plan Commission (1915–1916). (This was an American liberal political association to create a new political party for social reform in opposition to the increasingly conservatism in both the Republican and Democratic parties. The name reflect the 48 states of the time, as well as the desire for a broad, national movement of moderate progressives. The committee failed to form a third party, despite sympathetic activists from the labor movement in 1920. The "Forty-Eighters") then became constituents in the Conference for Progressive Political Action in 1922, a movement culminating in the independent candidacy of Robert LaFollete for President of the United States in 1924.

He may have been a communist, as some have stated. Diana Trilling wrote in her memoir The Beginning of the Journey (1993) that Huebsch refused to ever republish her husband Lionel Trilling's only novel, The Middle of the Journey (1947) because he was a communist. Whittaker Chambers: A Biography (1997) claims "Unbeknownst to Trilling, Viking's publisher [sic] Ben Huebsch was a Communist and had quietly offered his services to the Hiss defense", based on an unsigned memo dated January 27, 1949, from Meyer Zeligs, further cited by Twilight of the Intellectuals(1999) In 1934, Huebsch did help celebrate the tenth anniversary of Alexander Trachtenberg's International Publishers, the (un)official publisher for the CPUSA—along with other publishers, including Bennet Cerf of Random House, Alfred Knopf of Knopf Publishing, W. W. Norton of W. W. Norton & Company, John Chamberlain of The New York Times, and Lewis Gannett of the Herald Tribune. Huebsch joined the League of American Writers, a Popular Front group organized by the Communist Party in 1935 and disbanded in 1943. (His relative Edward Huebsch was also a member.

He died in London on August 7, 1964.