PUBLISHER

Jazz Age Publisher.

Horace Liveright was another of the flamboyant figures whose careers are inseparable from the 1920s. His style of success and his spectacular failure are emblematic of the decade. As head of Boni & Liveright he published an exciting list of books while hosting a perpetual party and spending himself into insolvency.

Boni & Liveright.

Liveright did not bother to complete high school. At sixteen he was working for a stock-brokerage office, and at eighteen he wrote the libretto and lyrics for an unproduced operetta. In 1917, after a series of unsuccessful business ventures, he was staked to a publishing partnership with Albert Boni by his wealthy father-in-law. Liveright had no publishing experience, but he had read widely and admired writers. The first Boni & Liveright project, the Modern Library, became the best-known American series of inexpensive classic reprints. Bound in...