HUNGRY FOR ADVENTURE

From her later accounts, she only pretended to be calm, smiling graciously as she boarded the C-47. The slight sway of her walk gave her an aura of confidence, though it came from a shot of bourbon she'd secretly swallowed before takeoff. Saluted by the handsome young lieutenant about to lift her over the gap between the plane's body and its metal steps, she was taken aback until she remembered that she wore a uniform. It was 1943, and for this flight, the army had designated Blanche a lieutenant colonel. The alcohol and a set of earplugs allowed her to fall asleep despite the noisy engine, and she was in Newfoundland before she knew it. Once in London, she changed into her civilian clothes. Routine bombing had been occurring nightly in the aftermath of the Blitz, and only hours after she'd arrived, an air raid siren blasted the air. She was having a drink at Claridge's, just a few blocks down from the Ritz, where she was staying, "both places miraculously intact." Blanche wrote that she "crossed the road and went upstairs to my room. I sat all dressed up in a wool dress, my handbag and my papers at my side, and worked with a splitting headache. Heard a lot of noise ... About a quarter to twelve there was a siren, and I [went downstairs where the reporters were gathered and asked], 'Is the air raid starting now?'" Everybody laughed, Blanche's mistake providing the most levity the reporters had known in weeks. "The siren was the all clear ... After that I never paid any attention to the raids. What I did was pull the blankets up over my ears and go back to sleep."

Though it was supposedly fully booked, the Ritz, where half the war correspondents were staying, somehow made room for Blanche. The day of her arrival she had rushed through the lobby during a blackout, accompanied by a British literary agent carrying flowers that an anonymous admirer had left for the publisher at the front desk. In the week that Blanche remained in London, she would share drinks and dinners (early, "because no buses ran after nine") with journalists, writers, and friends, including Edward R. Murrow, the CBS broadcast journalist. She would later publish a collection of his broadcasts that included his wartime coverage, but for now she was pleased that he had agreed the previous year to provide a blurb for a first book, Prelude to Victory, by Blanche's young author the reporter James B. "Scotty" Reston. At Reston's request, she had edited the book personally instead of handing it over to one of the first-rate house editors, and Knopf published it in 1942.

* * *

Born on July 30, 1894, in a pleasant but unprepossessing Upper West Side brownstone, she spent most of her premarital life on the Upper East Side at 40 East Eighty-Third Street, where the family moved after her birth — or at the Gardner School, on Fifth Avenue between Forty-Eighth and Forty-Ninth Streets. Founded in 1860 by a Baptist minister, Gardner was aimed primarily at well-off Jewish girls, as well as at non-Jews lacking the social clout to attend the more exclusive all-girls schools, such as Chapin or Brearley. The writer Mary Craig Kimbrough, who in 1913 married Upton Sinclair, author of The Jungle, had attended Gardner a few years before Blanche. Such an alliance for a southern girl from Mississippi suggests that Gardner was liberal leaning.

Like other young ladies being groomed for marriage, Blanche followed her well-meaning parents' agenda: taking piano and riding lessons in the mornings and studying French after school, when she was tended by a German nanny. Gardner allowed Blanche to escape a dull home, her pleasant but somewhat distant mother and father not being particularly interested in books or cultural life. Her brother wasn't much company, either. Eight years older, Irving was rarely around, except, as he matured, to persuade their father to back his latest business venture.

But at Gardner, Blanche entered an enchanted universe. A six-story French Renaissance building with modern conveniences, from electricity to elevators to its own filtration plant, Gardner thrilled Blanche with its winding white marble staircase that led to an endless array of grand bookcases. These were filled with books that fed all sorts of fantasies, in particular nineteenth-century novels by Jane Austen, George Eliot, Victor Hugo, Gustave Flaubert, and other literary masters. Her classmates would remember her as well liked but primarily a loner — some thought her shy, others a snob. While giggling classmates ran up and down the school stairs, Blanche stationed herself at the bottom, reading. Through her brother's wife, Irma, Blanche met Paula Herzig, Irma's cultivated sister, who taught her to value French literature in particular. Soon Paula was speaking French with Blanche and taking her to concerts to hear the Impressionist music of Claude Debussy, Maurice Ravel, and even Frederick Delius.

Blanche's childhood friend Rita Goodman Bodenheimer told an interviewer that after graduation from Gardner, Blanche changed, her "thoughts now only in the book world," but in reality such preoccupation was hardly a swerve from her interest while in school. Bodenheimer recalled that until Blanche met Alfred Knopf, she was "satisfied with being alone or with a few friends," but then "she decided her old friends were frivolous." She resolved to "improve herself," and she refused all beaux and walked her Boston terrier by herself, often reading along the way.

Such stories were told — often by envious schoolmates — fifty years after the fact. In addition to the primacy of reading, however, they do suggest themes that would define Blanche throughout the years, from her penchant for living alone to her love of dogs. She liked to make up parts of her life, too, later recounting little of her family that proved true — her fantasies and embellishments still glimpsed in Knopf's house histories and reference books today. One of the publisher's oft-repeated tales referred to her father, Julius Wolf, as a "gold jeweler from Vienna," though his immigration papers reveal that he was a farmer or day laborer ("Landmann") in Bavaria. Blanche's father abandoned farming during the immigration waves of the 1870s, a few years before yet another decree against Jews occurred. At the behest of a relative already settled in the New World, in 1877 Julius holed up in steerage and traded Hamburg for New York City. Through distant cousins working in a small Manhattan business, the clever newcomer mastered the making and selling of cloth and before long became a major manufacturer of caps and baby hats. By 1882 he was part owner of Sonn and Wolf, a millinery company that designed and made ruffles and trimmings. Julius left the business only months before it went bankrupt, luck or instinct determining his fate once again.

Bertha Samuels, Blanche's mother, had inherited money just in time to offer a solid dowry to Julius, following the custom of the day. Bertha's father, Lehman Samuels of Manhattan, along with his brother, was the country's largest exporter of beef and live cattle until 1877. That year, even as Julius Wolf sailed to America, Samuels Brothers became a casualty of the country's "Long Depression," one of the eighteen thousand American businesses and banks — and ten states — that went bankrupt, caught in the financial debacle of 1873–79. The New York Times reported that the demise of the Samuelses' firm, held in the highest esteem, shocked its customers. But, working ceaselessly, by 1885 Lehman Samuels had made his fortune back.

When Blanche was born in 1894, family finances were again on solid ground. The Wolfs soon moved into their home on the refined Upper East Side. There Julius, with his noticeable accent, habitually deferred to Bertha, who, as a first-generation American, cheerfully dominated the household. "Julius looked very jolly," Blanche's cousin remembered: "short, round, with ruddy cheeks and dancing brown eyes," even though he was also "austere — a typical German," she added. The few surviving photographs suggest a cheerful if rotund adult, the parent who, according to one of Blanche's breezy and improbable stories, would gladly take Blanche and a cousin to Paris for their high school graduations.

Bertha Samuels Wolf was a stout, self-possessed matriarch who proudly told Blanche that no one would have guessed her own father had run a slaughterhouse. Pictures of Blanche and her mother show two women laughing together heartily, not the stark family image recalled by those interviewed after Blanche's death. One of Blanche's early friends, Helene Fraenkel, dismissed Bertha Wolf as "exceedingly pretty but little and so fat that she was square." The Wolfs' lack of interest in the arts led Blanche, Fraenkel maintained, to seek "someone intellectual to marry."

Though Bertha, like her husband, at times could be remote, she managed to teach Blanche the importance of self-presentation. Bertha dressed well, favoring what would later be called "the Jewish uniform": smart, tailored black suits (in the 1920s made to order by the emerging couturier Sally Milgrim), always adorned with a string of pearls. One relative thought that Bertha looked like Lillian Russell when she was young and that Julius looked like "a typical butter-and-egg man." Whatever their appearance, the egg man's determination, as well as his wife's inheritance, enabled his daughter, years later, to adopt the attitude of those who came from wealth. Still, neither Julius nor Bertha was inclined to support a college education for either of their children, especially their daughter. Blanche does not seem to have considered going beyond high school, though Barnard (along with other colleges) had been available to women since the late 1880s. In her case, the conjugal wait after she finished Gardner would deliver her a profession, if male-inflected from its beginning. As one scholar notes, "Blanche would launch an esteemed career in literary publishing," guided by a man whose male professors were trained in a canon that emphasized male authors.

By the time she graduated from Gardner, Blanche had already set her sights on marrying the muscular, olive-skinned Alfred Knopf. Blanche found him attractive not least because, like her, he preferred books to people, reading voraciously at Columbia University and, during college breaks, at beaches on the South Fork of Long Island. Blanche had occasionally spoken to the athletic boy in Lawrence, on Western Long Island, where he lived on his father's estate.

Blanche, Jewish but secular, was relieved that Alfred proved no more religious than she. An agnostic, he showed even less interest in his Jewish identity than did his father, Sam, who had at least joined Temple Emanu-El, Manhattan's fashionable congregation, for the sake of appearances. Alfred's indifference meshed with Blanche's adult convictions and impatience with religion, which she increasingly believed did the world more harm than good. She and Alfred both disdained what was called Jewish society. Shopping on Rosh Hashanah, when she believed Manhattan stores to be less crowded, Blanche told disapproving friends that she had read too much about different cultures to believe in one spiritual authority.

The somewhat reserved adolescent girl nonetheless managed to charm much of the Jewish community of Woodmere, near Lawrence on Long Island's South Shore. In the 1970s, Elsie Alsberg, who before their marriage had known both Alfred and, less well, Blanche, recalled that the usually "solitary girl" occasionally "invited everyone" to her summer rental, supplying food, then joining in the singing and dancing, with a friend's father driving some of the guests home in his luxurious seven-passenger Pierce-Arrow. The summer after graduation, in 1911, the seventeen-year-old made her debut at the Lawrence Athletic Club, where, at a party, she was formally introduced to Alfred Knopf. Despite her friends' unkind whispers that they thought him unattractive and pedantic, Blanche enjoyed talking with him. A girl whose head was filled with exotic fables, she was drawn to his intellectual manner and self-possession. According to that young man's memories, it took "another year or so" before they became "seriously interested in each other."

Louis Davidson told his friend that if he himself didn't already have a girl, he'd go after this "beaut" himself. With medium-length copper-red hair, opaque gray-green eyes, and a curvaceous body, Blanche looked like a pre-Raphaelite beauty. Another friend remembers her perfect manners, and that she "rarely spoke ... absolute silence" — but that when she did, she had a "warm speaking voice." Eventually she would become, when necessary, an artful speaker but an even more astute listener, her fluid, elegant low voice and her ability to concentrate major assets throughout her career.

Years later, Blanche recalled how quickly she and Alfred became friends that summer of 1911. Alfred was delighted to keep company with such a practical girl, who, instead of "chatter," liked to talk about books — or, more accurately, to listen to him talk about them. But she'd have to forgo his tutelage for a while: after graduating from Columbia University in early 1912, Alfred took off for Germany for a six-month tour. He had arranged an introduction in England to the distinguished writer John Galsworthy, who in 1921 was to become the first president of PEN (Poets, Essayists and Novelists), the writers' organization that would eventually spread worldwide. Galsworthy was the subject of Alfred's senior thesis — their fateful meeting going on to inspire the acolyte to publish great writing.

As soon as he returned in June, the couple became an item, with Alfred working as an office boy for Doubleday. "Blanche knew exactly what I had been doing [figuring out the publishing world] when I started work at Doubleday's; and she was an avid reader, filled with enthusiasm for and vitally interested in whatever involved books and the people who wrote them ... And so [our] little firm was [soon] established," Alfred would recall succinctly of the couple's professional beginnings, entwined with the personal from the start. Blanche lauded Alfred's decision to scuttle law school, his original plan, one he had not found exciting even when considering it before graduation. Publishing, Blanche felt sure, would allow a place for her, while the law would require a college degree followed by further professional training.

Later she remembered how from its conception her relationship with Alfred was about books. Alfred "had [realized] I read books constantly and he had never met a girl who did. He was earning eight dollars a week [the equivalent of around $170 in 2015] ... I saw him and [all we did was] talk books, and nobody liked him — my family least of all. But I did, because I had someone to talk books to and we talked of making books ... We decided we would get married and make books and publish them." Some girls dreamed about making babies, but Blanche and Alfred wanted to make books.

"We never talked anything but books and music, music and books," she recalled nostalgically in later interviews.

I rode horseback with him occasionally, which was the only thing I had ever done all my life apart from playing the piano and studying ... I talked to my parents seriously [about marrying Alfred] and they wouldn't hear of it. There were twelve other men around I could marry but not this one. Not only because he was a Russian Jew [Alfred was in fact born in the United States] but, according to my family, his family of poor reputation, [was] not [meant] for me ... [Still I was determined to] marry him and publish books.

If Blanche brought to the table a life that lacked excitement, Alfred supplied all the drama anyone could want, his harrowing childhood and history affecting Blanche's future as much as his own. Sam Knopf, born in a Warsaw suburb in 1862, had reason to be proud, and seeing the esteem in which Alfred clearly held him, Blanche, too, admired the father. By the time she met him, he had become director of one of New York City's small mercantile banks.

But Alfred knew, firsthand, that life had been hard for Sam, the youngest of seven children. In spite of its longtime anti-Semitic policies, Poland enjoyed a liberal period when the Haskalah, a Jewish form of the Enlightenment, enabled a good life for Sam's parents: Abraham Knopf taught English at the University of Warsaw, while his wife, Hannah, earned a chemistry degree. By the late 1860s, however, anti-Semitic abuse prompted the Knopfs to flee the country and move to America. From the ship's arrival sprang the first of many probably apocryphal stories about the Knopf family, forming a legend both Alfred and Blanche encouraged: in what would be his five or six incomplete autobiographies, Alfred would consistently record that Abraham and Hannah, departing from the eastern frontier of western Russia, traveled by way of Manchuria to San Francisco, where they stopped to visit friends, the grandparents of Jascha Heifetz, the future violinist (later to become Blanche's lover), then sailed a wildly out-of-the-way route around the Horn to reach New York City in l873.