The temper of the West Book

"The Temper of the West is an "American Dream" story in the fullest sense. William Jovanovich was born in a tent in a Colorado mining camp to parents who had recently come to America - his father from Montenegro, his mother from Poland. Vladimir, as he had been christened, could not speak English when he started school. While attending Denver's Manual Training High School. Jovanovich earned a tuition scholarship to the University of Colorado. He then went to Harvard on a graduate fellowship to study English and American literature." "The Second World War intervened while Jovanovich was at Harvard, and he spent the war years as an officer in the U.S. Navy. After the war, Jovanovich studied briefly at Columbia University, where he was writing a dissertation on Emerson. Dropping out because of a lack of funds, he became a college traveler for Harcourt, Brace, and Company in 1947. By 1954 he was president of the company, which in 1970 became Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. When Jovanovich retired in 1991, HBJ was one of the largest publishers in the world." While at HBJ, Jovanovich edited Mary McCarthy, Diana Trilling, Charles A. Lindbergh, James Gould Cozzens, Milton Friedman, and Hannah Arendt, among others. But his friends and connections branched widely. Jovanovich's memoir includes many encounters and relationships - some of them brief and contentious, many of them deep and enduring - with the likes of T. S. and Valerie Eliot, Marshall McLuhan, Groucho Marx, Jerzy Kosinski, Eugene McCarthy, Erich Maria Remarque, Dean Acheson, B. F. Skinner, and Robert Maxwell (whose attempt at a hostile takeover of HBJ was thwarted by Jovanovich at a cost that led to his withdrawal from the company three years later).