Mary Aswell Doll

Elizabeth Nowell (b.1904) was a literary agent and Thomas Wolfe's first biographer and editor of his literary correspondence. My main interest in this book is Nowell and the way she worked as an agent. Clara Stites, co-editor, is her daughter; Mary Aswell Doll is Edward C. Aswell's daughter. Edward Aswell became Thomas Wolfe's editor and literary executor after Maxwell Perkins died.

Elizabeth Nowell, known to her clients as "Liddy," was a fascinating character. Born in 1904 in Massachusetts, she was a Yankee to her bones. She attended Bryn Mawr and later went to New York to work in the publishing business. She was married and divorced and raised her two daughters by herself while supporting them working as a literary agent.

"Holy jumping Jesus Christ!" is a typical profanity in Nowell's letters. She was just full of it--lively, funny, so loyal and hardworking for her clients, and never allowed herself to be pushed around by the men in the business. Early in her career, she tried to get a job with Scribner's and was told by Max Perkins, "There is no room for women on the fifth floor." So Liddy simply marched downstairs and applied for a job as a Scribner's secretary. She was one of a good-sized group of women in the late 1920s to early 1930s living in Manhattan--intelligent, hard-working, and educated, with jobs on magazines or in publishing houses, who later became literary agents.

The letters book benefits from a good deal of biographical material written by the daughters in the chapter headings. Nowell was dying of cancer even as she was desperately finishing the Wolfe biography. Her daughter Clara typed the ms for her when Nowell was receiving chemo treatments in the hospital. When Nowell died with editing left to be done on the ms, Edward Aswell promised Clara that he would do whatever needed to be done to finish Liddy's biography of Wolfe. However, soon after Liddy's death, Aswell himself died of a heart attack.

The fact that the biography was published was simply an amazing act of heroism on the part of Elizabeth Nowell--probably something that would have surprised no one who knew her.… (lisätietoja)