Correspondence files relating to Iris Murdoch

CW 548-CW 558

1953-1987

The firm that became Chatto & Windus in 1873 originated in the 1850s from the bookselling business of John Camden Hotten. On Hotten’s death, his employee Andrew Chatto acquired the business with a sleeping partner, W.E. Windus. In 1946 it acquired The Hogarth Press, which had been establoished by in 1917 by Virginia and Leonoard Woolf . In 1969 Chatto & Windus merged with Jonathan Cape, with all three imprints being retained, as was The Bodley Head when it joined the firm in 1973. In 1987 the group was purchased by Random House. English and American literature were the strengths of the list. The firm published many celebrated authors – Robert Louis Stevenson, Marcel Proust, Laurie Lee, Christopher Isherwood, Aldous Huxley, Sigmund Freud and Iris Murdoch among them. Cecil Day-Lewis, Poet Laureate, was editorial director in the 1960s. Source: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.co.uk/publishers/vintage/chatto-windus/

11 boxes

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