"To Educate, Celebrate, and Enrich": Max Rudin on the Revolution in American Literature
Max Rudin, President & Publisher, joined Library of America in 1980, soon after its founding, and has served a principal role in the curation and publication of the Library’s authoritative 330+-volume series.
During his tenure, Rudin has developed numerous nationwide publishing and programming initiatives centering on Library of America editions, including the forthcoming Lift Every Voice: Why African American Poetry Matters, as well as World War I and America for the 2017 centennial, Civil War 150 for the Civil War sesquicentennial in 2012−14, Lincoln in American Memory for the Lincoln bicentennial in 2009, and Singer 100 celebrating the centennial of Isaac Bashevis Singer in 2004. He has also served on the Content Leadership Team for the American Writers Museum in Chicago and as Project Director for six Teaching American History initiatives under grants from the U.S. Department of Education.
Beyond his leadership role at LOA, Rudin writes on American history, literature, music, and popular culture. He has curated exhibitions for the New-York Historical Society and the New York Public Library and frequently lectures on American writing.
Rudin holds degrees in English and American literature from Princeton University and Columbia University.
Maryam Gamar (BT): Were you a big reader growing up? What was your favorite childhood book?
Max Rudin (MR): I was a big reader growing up. The book I remember best from my childhood was Robin Hood, and I think that's probably why I ended up playing in a band later on. But since I have had two children to whom I've read their own favorite books now, their childhood favorites have kind of eclipsed my own in my head. My favorite book in high school was Walden.
BT: How did your educational background in English and Comparative Literature play a role in shaping your career path?
MR: Well, it was an accident. I hadn't planned a career in publishing, and I was headed toward college teaching. I was in grad school at Columbia after Princeton, and my stipend wasn't covering my expenses. At that time, Library of America was just starting up and needed people who knew about American writing, which was my specialty.
I started to spend time consulting to Library of America (LOA) and writing reports about writers that they wanted to publish. As things developed, I just ended up getting more interested in that work. So slowly but surely, I moved in that direction. As it turned out, apart from my graduate school colleagues who went on to become professors, I'm using my literary background in my job more than most people I know. It turned out to be extraordinarily useful in my job. There's no question that my background in American literature and history ended up being crucial to the path I took.
BT: When you started working for LOA, what did you have to learn in terms of business and marketing?
MR: Library of America is a nonprofit project that started with seed funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Ford Foundation. The idea was that other countries have national editions of their literature. The United States didn't have such a thing. As a result, works even by central figures like Herman Melville were constantly going in and out of print. So the idea was to create this project that would produce these books, which would be kept in print forever.
What was clear from the beginning was that in order to reach the readers we wanted to reach, it wasn't going to be enough to be sold only through bookstores. There was going to have to be a retail channel, but also a direct to consumer channel. In 1980, that looked a lot different than it looks now. What direct to consumer meant then was selling subscriptions through direct marketing. It was all about direct mail and about direct response print advertising and the various channels through which you could do direct response advertising. That has all changed now with the rise of the Internet. The leading edge now is webstore and driving sales and subscriptions through Internet advertising.
“There’s an extraordinarily rich tradition of African-American writing in America, which is part of American literature, and without which it’s impossible to understand American literature or American history... I think that the Library of America’s role is to educate, to celebrate, and to enrich the conversation by exploring that rich past.”
BT: In light of the current attention on the Black Lives Matter movement, what role do you think American literature has played in erasing minority narratives, and how can literature be used as a tool for empowerment?
MR: It’s true that minority writers historically have not had the same access or opportunities to tell their stories. It’s also true that there's an extraordinarily rich tradition of African-American writing in America, which is part of American literature, and without which it’s impossible to understand American literature or American history. The tradition is there to be discovered and rediscovered. I think that the Library of America’s role is to educate, to celebrate, and to enrich the conversation by exploring that rich past.
Our nonprofit status is based on our cultural/educational role, not any advocacy role, per se, but having said that, I think that our list, both currently and prospectively, speaks very strongly to the current moment. Our editions of James Baldwin, Frederick Douglass,, W. E. B. DuBois, and Zora Neale Hurston have become among our books that are most in demand. And so what I take that to mean is that readers are turning to these Library of America volumes to educate themselves and to understand how history informs the current moment. And that's our job: to make that writing available and to make it accessible and hopefully to steer people to it.
BT: As a non-profit, how are the LOA operations run and funded?
MR: At the moment, we cover 65 to 70 percent of our budget through sales of our books. We publish about 20 titles a year. The 30 percent that is contributed comes from different sources: an annual fund drive, a membership program that offers books and other benefits, a gift sets program that allows people to donate a set to an institution of their choice, and donations that help support individual publishing and outreach projects, like our LOA in the Classroom initiative.
We also have a program called the Guardians of American Letters Fund, through which an individual or foundation can endow a volume to help keep it available to readers in perpetuity. We seek a guardian for each book: you can donate a certain amount of money and “adopt” a book. We have a collection of writing for example about World War One that is kept in print through a gift from someone in honor of their father who served in World War One. Someone endowed Laura Ingalls Wilder’s complete works in honor of his wife and daughter. We have volumes devoted to great environmental writing that are supported in part through a family foundation devoted to environmental issues. The idea is to find someone who will attach their name to a writer or work to help keep it available.
“Readers are turning to these Library of America volumes to educate themselves and to understand how history informs the current moment. And that’s our job: to make that writing available and to make it accessible and hopefully to steer people to it.”
BT: Looking forward, what is something you hope the LOA will achieve in the long term?
MR: To continue to fulfill and expand our editorial vision of a series of essential American texts—essential and surprising—that honors the democratic inclusiveness of American literary culture and the multi-stranded complexity of American history. To grow our endowment and channels of contributed support so we can continue to curate and make permanently available authoritative editions of acknowledged masterpieces, neglected gems, essential historical writings, and the eloquent witness of ordinary Americans. To create and spearhead important national public humanities initiatives, like our current project, Lift Every Voice: Why African American Poetry Matters, launching this fall. To find ways to connect more and more readers with great American writing.
Audience development is key. One of the ways we keep in touch with our customers and donors is by doing in-person events. Well, we couldn't do those when the pandemic struck. So we were forced to accelerate a launch of an online webinar series. The first event had six hundred people, which is probably seven or eight times the number we would have had for a bookstore or other private event, which is amazing and suggests that this is a promising direction which is filling a felt need.
Online events in turn produce digital content which lives on the website and helps further our mission to foster understanding and appreciation of the texts we publish. So, it's very clearly a direction which deserves investment of our energy and time. I think that figuring out the most effective ways to use the medium for high quality humanities programs would go a long way to accelerate audience development, bringing new people, bringing younger people -- the average age of people who attend online cultural programs is lower that people who attend live events, so that’s a direction that cultural organizations like Library of America need to pay attention to.