To the editor:
Thank you for David Spear’s fascinating article on Landmark Books (“Generation Past,” October 2016). Spear identified one of the two reasons I became a professional historian—the other being Grosset & Dunlap’s competitor Signature Books and its follow-up We Were There series, of which I must have read about 25 volumes.
I always had the impression that the Landmark series was of slightly higher quality, and reading of Bennett Cerf’s editorial policy, I now understand why. There were exceptions: the Signature biography of George Washington Carver left such an impression on me that 50 years later I hunted up a used copy for my son and discovered to my surprise that it had been authored by Arna Bontemps, a major figure in the Harlem Renaissance, who by that time was head librarian at Fisk University. Sixty years later I can still feel the almost physical pain I experienced when Carver, after a color-blind admission to a Kansas college, was turned away because of his race. Whatever social conscience I have can be credited in no small measure to that book.
Walter D. Kamphoefner earned his Ph.D. at University of Missouri-Columbia in 1978 and arrived in 1988 at Texas A&M University, where he is now Professor of History.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Attribution must provide author name, article title, Perspectives on History, date of publication, and a link to this page. This license applies only to the article, not to text or images used here by permission.
