Hugh Ford - Women of Montparnasse archive, 1977-1978

16 typescript or autograph letters and 8 typescript proposals or drafts. May 1977-October 1978.

This collection includes correspondence between author Hugh D. Ford and Ray Roberts, senior editor at Doubleday Publishing Company. The two discuss the publication of The Women of Montparnasse, a memoir by author, editor, and diplomat Morrill “Bill” Cody to be co-written by Ford. The book was commissioned in 1978 by John Didier Editions (Paris) to be based on Cody’s recollections, but rewritten and edited by Ford, who had already written several books on the American community in Paris in the 1920s, most notably Published in Paris (Macmillan, 1975). The Women of Montparnasse profiled a large number of women who Cody knew while he lived in Paris, all part of the “Lost Generation”: Sylvia Beach, Gertrude Stein, Margaret Anderson, Nancy Cunard, Zelda Fitzgerald, Isadora Duncan, Nadia Boulanger, and others. This collection contains updates sent by Ford to Doubleday, which had been offered rights to the English-language publication, about progress on the book, as well as sample chapters on Stein and Fitzgerald. The editors at Doubleday expressed wariness about the project from the beginning, since, by the late 1970s, a plethora of books already existed about the Lost Generation. The proposal was received positively, but upon reviewing several sections of the work in progress, Ray Roberts declined to go forward with the publication. The Women of Montparnasse was eventually published in 1984 by Cornwall Books.