Conversation Pieces: Circulating Muriel Draper’s Salon

Muriel Draper, a once preeminent American modernist literary figure, turned conversation into a mode of authorship through her varied career as a salon hostess, writer, and radio broadcaster. The archival papers surrounding her memoir of her music salon, Music at Midnight (1929), and her NBC radio program, “It’s a Woman’s World” (1937–1938), reveal that Draper’s contribution to modernism was not literature as we typically conceive it. By providing an alternative articulation of literary form, which blended oral and written modes, her memoir and radio show activated a network of female fan mail writers. Correlating conversation with the music of her salon, Draper challenged modernist claims about music’s impersonality while also encouraging her audience to take seriously the literary merits of their talk. From her audience of listeners and readers emerged a public of women writers, for whom the smallest acts of literary participation gained importance through Draper’s example.