IN MY OWN TIME

by John Lehmann ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 24, 1969

John Lehmann, one of the company of prominent British publishers (Leonard Woolf, Victor Gollancz, et al.) to look back on their life in print, wrote this autobiography some years ago. It appeared originally in England in three volumes. Largely given to intellectual and literary concerns, discreet and at times impersonal (his reference to a major emotional crisis stemming from the termination of a love affair is never amplified), Mr. Lehmann primarily records the several decades in which he was an active publisher and editor: with the Woolfs and their Hogarth Press, as founder of Penguin New Writing, and finally the establishment of his own firm. The first volume of this record deals with his own serene and secure childhood, followed, predictably, by Eton and Cambridge where his interest in poetry and in writing poetry was initiated. Even if forfeited in later years by the pressures of his other work. The second and third volumes deal almost exclusively with his many interesting associations with the leading writers of the '30's and '40's on both sides of the Atlantic and certainly in England he was an outstanding tutelar of talent. The end of his firm in 1952, due to financial difficulties, and the previous demise of New Writing were not without their backlash of regret and recrimination.... In the tradition, a russet-toned, civilized, leisurely memoir of sustained but subdued interest. It appears with perhaps a prohibitive price for its under 600 pages.

Pub Date: June 24, 1969

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Little, Brown--A.M.P.

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1969

Categories: NONFICTION