David McDowell: Forgotten man of letters

Abstract

In the fall of 1957, with the financial backing of his partner Ivan Obolensky, David McDowell released the first book list of McDowell, Obolensky, Inc. It was a small but auspicious debut: two of the six titles released that season garnered extensive critical and commercial success. Andrew Lytle's The Velvet Horn and James Agee's A Death in the Family were both nominated for the National Book Award, and Agee's novel won the Pulitzer Prize; both were bestsellers. Although McDowell would leave the firm in 1960, during the three years of his collaboration with Obolensky, he published several other notable titles to great critical acclaim. Yet, today McDowell is a nearly forgotten figure in American publishing. In spite of the remarkable success of his tenure as editor-in-chief, his contribution to American letters is commemorated only by a short entry on the firm in the Dictionary of Literary Biography, James Laughlin's comments on him in Remembering Williams Carlos Williams, one interview about his connection to Agee, and the scattered obituaries which appeared at his death in 1985. This article attempts to augment the scant record of McDowell's career, beginning with a biographical sketch of McDowell and then moving into an examination of his correspondence with author Andrew Lytle from his papers on deposit at Vanderbilt University. While McDowell appears to have had troubled relationships with other publishers, what emerges from the lengthy McDowell-Lytle correspondence is the portrait of an exemplary relationship between editor and author—and a record of McDowell's commitment to the written word.