Segal, Lore

OTHER PEOPLE'S HOUSES [SIGNED]

New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1964. First Edition, First Printing. Octavo, 312 pages; VG/G+; in blue and orange dust jacket, blue and orange spine with black and white titling; mild rubbing and wear, chip missing at head of spine, sun-fading and scratching to spine; dust jacket protected with a mylar covering, price uncut '$5.95';

Inscribed on the ffep by Lore Segal, "To Rachel / who imposed much / of the order of this book / affectionately / Lore"

JM consignment; Case 6.

1328466

Shelved Dupont Bookstore

Price: $400

NOTES

Rachel MacKenzie was a fiction editor at The New Yorker from 1956 through 1979. Known for nurturing the careers of such literary giants as Isaac Bashevis Singer and Saul Bellow, she also had a correspondence with Muriel Spark and encouraged her to submit to the New Yorker.

Charles McGrath, former writer and editor for The New Yorker, writes "MacKenzie was a bluestocking, a former college professor, who had a discerning eye for talent (she more or less discovered Isaac Singer and was a supporter of the young Philip Roth)..."

Lore Segal is an American novelist, translator, teacher, short story writer and author of children's books, City. Her book Shakespeare's Kitchen was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2008. Other People's Houses collects her refugee stories from The New Yorker as well as a few new ones. Segal fictionalized her experience growing up in five different English households, from the wealthy Orthodox Jewish Levines to the working-class.

"...I sent The New Yorker my ur-story about the Children's Transport that had brought me and some five hundred children from Nazi-occupied Vienna to England. I enclosed, along with the SASE, a note saying, “Is there any anybody there, beside the pencil which writes ‘Sorry’ at the bottom of the rejections?”...[after receiving an acceptance letter] I phoned The New Yorker and was summoned to Rachel M[a]cKenzie's office. Rachel, a woman - a lady - in her forties, hair nicely coiffed, wore some dark and quiet that insisted on drawing no attention to itself... [Lore Segal: A (Complicated) Love Letter to Editors, 2019]