Designing John Hersey's The Wall: W. A. Dwiggins, George Salter, and the Challenges of American Holocaust Memory

Widely admired in 1950 for a list of authors including Willa Cather, Thomas Mann, and Albert Camus, the House of Knopf was even more es-teemed within the book trade for the quality and design of its volumes. Founder Alfred A. Knopf brought to his company a devotion to the book-making craft that had been largely absent from American publishing since the advent of machine presses in the mid-nineteenth century, a commitment founded on the premise that excellent texts warranted equally impressive design and production. "I believe that good books should be well made," he wrote in a 1957 publisher's credo, "and I try to give every book I publish a format that is distinctive and attractive."¹ To achieve that publishing ideal, which many would come to associate with Knopf's famous Borzoi insignia, he engaged some of the best designers of his day, artists who infused the firm's list with a sensibility that envisioned trade books as both commercial and aesthetic objects.

As early as 1930 Knopf had stated that books "better-looking-than-necessary" were manufactured when publishers were driven "by an inner compulsion stronger than the arguments of bankers." Although keenly aware of financial imperatives, Knopf was committed to the long-term benefits that producing handsome volumes would bring to his company. He felt that "over a period of time a publisher can win a certain following for what we might call the style of his books," perhaps finally increasing sales and profits. "But he still has periodically to face the unpleasant fact," Knopf lamented, "that he is competing for authors—and for sales—with publishers who have no feeling at all for the book except as a piece of merchandise."²

John Hersey, whose mass-market appeal had been early established with the award-winning A Bell for Adano (1944), remained loyal to Knopf in no small measure because the publisher had "done more for the appearance of books in the United States than anyone else."³ A noted correspondent for Time and Life, Hersey by 1947 had not only won a Pulitzer Prize for this first novel, but had published a long essay on the atomic bombing of Hiroshima that had quickly become a multifaceted media sensation. Based on interviews with six survivors of the blast, "Hiroshima" first appeared in 1946 as an entire issue of The New Yorker and was widely excerpted, broadcast on radio, discussed on editorial pages, and even distributed at no charge to Book-of-the-Month Club subscribers.

After Hersey's conversations with A-bomb victims in Hiroshima, he felt compelled to begin research for a novel on another horrific chapter in the annals of the twentieth century, one he had encountered as a reporter during the war's final year: the destruction of Europe's Jews. He had seen the ruins of the Warsaw Ghetto and had interviewed survivors of the Lodz Ghetto. But it was his encounter with the concentration camp system—"where, in the last hours before the Russians came in, the Nazis tried to destroy every human being in their hands"—that had the most profound impact on this American "traveling naïve in the totalitarian jungle."⁴ Five years before Anne Frank's diary would captivate American readers, and more than a decade before the Adolf Eichmann trial would at last force many Jewish American writers to address the subject, Time/Life journalist John Hersey had somehow arrived at the terminus a quo of literary engagement with the Holocaust, what Alvin Rosenfeld astutely identifies as the fundamental challenge posed by the "post-Auschwitz imagination." When "fact itself surpasses fiction, what is there left for the novel and the short story to do?"⁵

Perhaps only a journalist would have attempted as early as 1947 to write fiction about the recent murder of six million Jews. The subject, however, ultimately pulled Hersey away from the reportage that had served him on the Russian front and in Hiroshima's ruins and pushed him toward a new type of...