Ferris Greenslet to Charles W. Chesnutt, 31 January 1931
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HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
2 PARK STREET • BOSTON
CABLE ADDRESS
MULIER BOSTON
THE RIVERSIDE PRESS
Cambridge, Massachusetts
January 31, 1931.
Dear Mr. Chesnutt:
I am exceedingly sorry to have to write to you that while several of us here have read your new novel with interest, we are doubtful as to whether we can publish it with any reasonable hope of a satisfactory success under present conditions.1 To write to you quite frankly the unanimous feeling is that the book as worked out has rather the color of a thesis novel and does not, therefore, quite succeed in making the reader lose himself in a complete illusion. We are exceedingly sorry to have been forced to this conclusion but since we have been, we see nothing for it, therefore, but to tell you so frankly.2 We are returning the manuscript under separate cover by express prepaid with our thanks for the opportunity of seeing it.
Sincerely yours, HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY Ferris Greenslet Ferris Greenslet FG:BS Charles W. Chesnutt, Esq. 1646 Union Trust Building Cleveland, OhioCorrespondent: Ferris Greenslet (1875–1959) was a White writer and editor associated with Houghton Mifflin in the years after the company first published Chesnutt's works. After a stint as associate editor for the Atlantic Monthly from 1902 to 1907, he became a literary advisor and director at Houghton Mifflin (1910–1933) and later general manager of their trade department (1933–1942).
1. This is a reference to The Quarry, Chesnutt's novel that had been rejected by Alfred Knopf, Inc., in late 1928 or early 1929. Houghton Mifflin Co. rejected it in 1931, and it remained unpublished during Chesnutt's lifetime. [back]
2. A single internal reader report at Houghton Mifflin Company, by an unidentified reader with the initials K. T., recommends to decline, called The Quarry a "polemical novel," and thought "the characters are wooden, the situations unplausible, the writing undistinguished, the moral all too plain" (Houghton Mifflin Company Reader Reports, Box 103, MS AM 2516 [MS. No. D3794], Houghton Library, Harvard University). [back]
