Charles W. Chesnutt to Houghton Mifflin Company, 13 September 1921
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September 13, 1921.
Houghton-Mifflin Company,
4 Park Street,
Boston, Mass.
Dear Sirs:
I beg to acknowledge receipt of your check of August 31st for $11.30, for royalties on my books, for which please accept my thanks.
After corresponding with Mr. Pratt, your syndicate manager,1 I have arranged with the Chicago Defender, a newspaper published in that City,2 for the serial republication of my "The House Behind the Cedars,"3 which they are advertising extensively, and I hope it may result in some increase in the sales of the book.
Yours very truly, CWC/FLCorrespondent: Houghton Mifflin Company had its roots in Ticknor and Fields, a notable publishing house founded in 1832 in Boston, Massachusetts. By 1880, Houghton, Mifflin & Company (later incorporated as Houghton Mifflin Company) had become a major force in U.S. publishing, a position strengthened when it began to publish textbooks in the 1890s. The firm published both of Chesnutt's short story collections and two of his three novels, and as publishers of the Atlantic Monthly, several of his short stories. Chesnutt corresponded with the company from 1891 to 1931.
1. William Brace Pratt (1886–1961) was a White Bostonian who graduated from Yale in 1906. He worked for Houghton Mifflin's Special Sales department from 1907 to 1929; as the manager of the syndicate bureau, he frequently correspondended with Chesnutt about the film rights to his works in the 1920s. [back]
2. The Chicago Defender, a Black weekly newspaper, was founded in 1905 by Robert S. Abbott (1870–1940), who was its publisher and editor until his death. From early on, the paper had an anti-segregation, anti-lynching platform, encouraged Blacks to move North, and reached a broad national audience. Chesnutt's The House Behind the Cedars was serialized in the paper in 1921–1922. [back]
3. The House Behind the Cedars (Houghton Mifflin, 1900) was Chesnutt's first published novel. House evolved over more than a decade from a short story, "Rena Walden," first drafted in the late 1880s. It was the only novel by Chesnutt to be serialized, once in 1900-1901 in the monthly Self Culture and again in 1921-1922 in the Black weekly Chicago Defender. House was also his only novel to be adapted to film (1924 and 1932). [back]
