John William Richard Beecroft
Sex: M
Individual Information
Birth: 22 Jun 1902 - Superior, WI
Christening:
Death: 21 Sep 1966 - NY
Burial:
Cause of Death:
AFN :
Events
• Census, Wisconison State, 1905 in Superior City, Douglas Co, WI
Ward 5• Census, Federal, 1910 in Superior City, Douglas Co, WI
John Becroft, age 49, born Canada, (parents born Canada); wife Theresa, age 40, born MI, (parents born Germany); Florence M, age 13y, born MI; son William R, age 2y, born WI.
Ward 5• Event, 1958
John Becroft, age 50y, born Canada, immigrated 1874; wife Thressa, age 42y, born Germany, immigrated 1870; dau Florence, age 16, born MI; son William, age 8y, born WI.
http://www.wccusd.k12.ca.us/elcerrito/compsci/student/2002/Christa/cats.htm• Biography, 1993
"A cat is a cat and very pleased to be a cat. The cat knows he is a special and superior creation. To those persons who also know that the cat is not just another animal the cat grants the privilege of feeding and sheltering him. The cat will also give those privileged persons some affection- often at the most inconvenient time, except for the cat. Living with the cat requires some adjustment - much as in a marriage. The cat expects full consideration of his dignity. The cat expects to be admired. The cat expects to be left alone when cat problems have to be pondered over - and also when he just wants to be left alone. Meals must be appetizing, varied, and on time. The darling who purred so contentedly may jump off your lap and a moment later turn on you a stare asking if introductions were ever made." - John Beecroft, 1958
John Beecroft and the Literature Business• Biography
By Leo J. Hertzel
In the autumn 1925 issue of The Transatlantic Review, Glenway Wescott, complaining that in America conservative citizens viewed serious literature with "moral disgust," concluded, "It seems necessary to do something --- to deliver a lecture, to commit suicide, to take the next boat to Paris."
Many Americans agreed. Some of the more talented --- James Thurber, Gertrude Stein, Duke Ellington, Sylvia Beach, e e cummings (there were many more, of course) --- fled to Paris using the city as a refuge from American censorship, prohibition, and other restrictions imposed by the puritan ethic. Back home expatriates were denounced in newspapers, magazines, sermons, accused of immorality, cultural treason. Americans should work to make this a better country, said the critics, not run off to foreign places in pursuit of false values in decadent societies.
About the time this conflict was at its height, twenty-three-year-old John William Beecroft graduated from Superior Normal School in Superior, Wisconsin. "Expect great things of yourself and expect to do these great things now," said the speaker at his graduation ceremony. Beecroft was an idealistic, ambitious young man, product of Superior elementary and secondary schools. He was, unfortunately, taunted by his classmates, who called him a sis and a "pet." Willie Beecroft "did not participate in the running and thumping of our athletic outfits," a schoolmate recalled. Willie Beecroft was interested in Shakespeare and Greek drama in translation and had been advised by his high school English teacher that his life work should be "in literature."
In 1923, restless after a bleak year of teaching arithmetic to junior high school children in Duluth, Beecroft arrived in New York City. He worked as a bit player in a Broadway play. He earned a degree in literature at Columbia. He wrote a guide to the study of the Harvard Classics ("The Harvard Classics will repay you manyfold in dividends of delight and satisfaction for the hours you have spent in the company of the immortal writers.").
In 1927 he joined the expatriates in Paris.
Beecroft enjoyed the old buildings, the paintings in the museums, the statues in Paris. He went to Italy to learn about antiques and architecture. He spoke no Italian and very little French --- he was not a sociable young man. He was withdrawn and shy --- some people said arrogant --- and he was uncomfortable with the disorder of expatriate life. One day he came across Andrew Bride of Paris, a thinly clever novel by Henry Sydnor Harrison which satirized the very American expatriate life Beecroft himself was trying to live.
The character Andrew Bride is a "frenchified" American, part of a group of post-World War I intellectuals living in France who " . . . poured a deadly fire upon the American scene . . ." Fortunately, Andrew meets Mary Jackson from Michigan. She helps him see America as the land of the future, the proper place for real Americans to live and work. Andrew and Mary return to Michigan together where they plan to build a virtuous and productive life.
John Beecroft liked this book. It reminded him of the faith in American institutions he had known at home, back in Superior, learned in school --- especially from his high school English teacher, Miss Lulu Dickinson, who was very much a rebel herself but a patriotic American nevertheless. He and Miss Dickinson had spent hours together reading poetry and talking about literature and the frontier virtues. "Suddenly, I discovered that everything new in Europe was coming straight from America," he told Bennett Cerf later, "so I decided to go home."
Aboard ship he found a brochure describing the Literary Guild, one of the new book clubs in America. Calling itself a "guild" instead of a "book club" in order to emphasize the high intellectual and literary levels of its offerings, the Literary Guild promised that it would bring a new book of classic quality every month to Americans across the nation. It was especially committed to bringing high quality books to readers in the Midwest, to towns (like Superior) where good new books were hard to find. This was exactly what John Beecroft was looking for. The day after he got off the boat, he applied for a job with the guild and was hired as a junior editor. Among his other duties, he would edit Wings, the little promotional magazine sent monthly to every member.
[p. 5]
was an exciting job for an ambitious young man from the Midwest with literary hopes. He met authors. He visited the offices of important literary journals and met editors. He wrote promotional copy for the guild. Sometimes he even wrote endorsements for the monthly classic selection, and the endorsements appeared in Wings. The senior editors, however, would not allow him to sign his name to these pieces. Nevertheless, this was a good job. He was working to improve American culture instead of ridiculing it like the expatriates back in Europe. He was also making a good salary.
But the timing was wrong. The Great Depression was nearly fatal to such luxuries as book clubs. ("One of the saddest experiences to be had by any writer in America now is to go into the office of almost any American book or magazine publishing house," wrote Sherwood Anderson, back from Europe himself, in 1932. "Lord, what gloom, what deep despair.") John Beecroft lost his job.
York writers and editors were talking about socialism, the inevitability of socialism in America. John Beecroft invested his savings in a trip to Russia to see for himself what socialism was like. He returned to New York with a confirmed faith in capitalism and other American institutions. "To anyone who thinks he is suffering from deprivation in America by loss of a settled income and its attendant standard of living, I recommend a trip to Russia," he wrote in an essay titled "Bread Not So Bitter," which he tried unsuccessfully to sell in 1932. ". . . my lasting benefit from my Russian trip was a shrunken stomach."
He also said the difference between people in Russia and people in America was that people in Russia willingly gave up luxuries like meat and bread because they had hope of a better future. "We, here in America, go without sufficient food because our system is not efficient and suffer hopelessly while nothing is done to make our system efficient."
Hopelessly. The need for hope in America became an important matter for John Beecroft.
Meanwhile, the Literary Guild was having problems. There was member concern that guild sales of books by foreign writers was taking jobs away from needy American writers. There was concern that some guild selections by literary intellectuals held America up to ridicule.
The June 1932 guild selection was an anthology, America As Americans See It, by Fred J. Ringel. It contained forty-six humorous pieces and some cartoons about America: skyscrapers, Hollywood, chain stores, graft, the Great Depression itself. A letter in the September 1932 issue of Wings from C.A.B. of New York City told the guild it wasn't funny when cynical intellectuals made fun of America:
I should like to know what could have possessed those jurors of yours when they selected Americans As Americans See It . . . It is about as cheap stuff as one could imagine being written and is an insult to every normal American. Each contributor seems to have been imbued with the idea that he or she should be funny, with the result that they were not in the least amusing, nor arising even to the dignity of satire --- just cheap, is all I can say, as one might expect to find in The New Yorker or something equally of the gutter class.
When the guild tried to deal more soberly with the painful realities of the depression by choosing Burton Rascoe's Hungry Men, a book with "authentic and graphic pictures of men out of work, hungry, living in makeshift shelters, in 'flop-houses,'" members protested they did not need to buy a book to see such things. We see those things every day right outside our own doors, they said.
Eventually, the Literary Guild was reorganized and John Beecroft was rehired. In 1937, experienced and ambitious, he survived a bitter office power struggle to became the sole editor. He alone would choose the monthly guild books sent to members for the next twenty-five years.
One of Beecroft' s first book selections was American Dream by Michael Foster. "In this novel Michael Foster explains the reasons for America's greatness and tells us more about ourselves as a nation than is found in many history books," Beecroft wrote in Wings. "Until you have read it you will have to take [p. 6]
our word that American Dream is a grand book --- a story that gives the reader faith, hope, and courage."
Early in 1938 he chose American Years by Harold Sinclair. Beecroft wrote, "Here is a book that throbs with the life blood of America, that shows what sort of people made America. Then there was America Now, Harold B. Stearne's encouraging survey. Then The Tree of Liberty, followed by The Fifty Best American Short Stories. There was nothing heavy or intellectually demanding about Beecroft's choices. They were light and entertaining. They were uniformly optimistic about America's future.
The Literary Guild was going in a new direction and membership began to grow.
Most members, then as always, were women. Most had graduated from high school, but very few had gone to college. They lived in towns with populations of less than 100,000, and many lived in villages or on farms across the prairies of the Midwest. During the waning days of the Great Depression and the long anxious years of World War II, more and more of them looked forward to receiving Beecroft's monthly selections in the mail. The books he chose were entertaining. Most of them were simple, down-to-earth stories about trials and victories. A lot of them were about America's rich past and its promising future. Women told their friends, "The guild keeps your spirits up."
Beecroft married Melenda Pollen Schmidt, a descendent of John and Priscilla Alden, and they moved into a large home on Long Island which they proceeded to fill with paintings, statues, cats, and antiques.
He selected Wild Geese Calling, The Sun Is My Undoing, Frenchman's Creek, Elliot Paul's The Last Time I Saw Paris, Congo Song, Chicken Every Sunday, Betty Smith's A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Somerset Maugham's The Razor's Edge, Anna and the King of Siam, Samuel Shellabarger's Captain from Castile, Sinclair Lewis's Kingsblood Royal. There was variety --- romantic fiction, humor, light history, even some poetry, but nearly all of the selections left the reader with a good feeling about life, especially about life in America. Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead did not make the guild list nor did anything by Nathanael West. Observers at the time said Beecroft wanted to raise the reading level of the public, as long as the process did not diminish book sales.
The Literary Guild grew and prospered and became at the time the largest commercial publishing venture in the history of the nation. In 1948 critic Merle Miller, writing in Harper's magazine, called John Beecroft "one of the two or three most powerful figures in the American publishing business." By that time, Beecroft' s selection of a book meant the author became an immediate celebrity, rewarded with substantial sums of money. Guild membership had reached nearly 2,000,000, and each month about 75 percent bought the Beecroft selection. Beecroft was convinced that the guild was successful because members genuinely liked to read his choices. He was getting Americans to read books. Hadn't that been his hope when he returned from Paris?
"Probably the most important thing we can say about the Guild is this: It helps increase book reading," said an article in a 1946 issue of Double-Life, the house publication of Doubleday Company. There was no mention of the guild offering books of a high intellectual or literary quality.
"On my visits to department stores," Beecroft said, "the employees and Guild representatives told me that Guild books were read; whereas the Book of the Month Club books were taken home and put on the shelves." Whether or not this statement was accurate, guild members did buy so many books that [p. 7] anxious writers began studying the books' structures and style, hoping to produce the one that Beecroft would select next time. Bookstores were filled with imitation Beecrofts.
Doubleday book sales were so strong the company built a special plant in Hanover, Pennsylvania, to handle book club editions.
Beecroft read and read. Other book clubs had editorial boards that spread the reading around, but Beecroft alone chose the guild selection each month. He read at least twelve books a week every week, some in proofs, some in manuscript form. He told friends he skimmed as many as twenty-five other books and manuscripts every week. He visited his New York office only two days a week, usually to oversee copy for the next Wings, sign correspondence, and attend editorial conferences. Afterwards, restless, he might drop in at a bookstore, visit with sales people and customers, and ask what they thought of guild books, how they compared.
He avoided authors. He avoided literary luncheons.
His real work was done the other five days of the week when he remained at home reading far into the night. It was lonely, tedious work. He drank gin as he read, and he began to feel a dull, corrosive anger toward authors of the endless books. He grew angry at what he saw as the cynicism of New York editors and publishers, people who cared for nothing but money. He began to think of greed as the main ingredient of the eastern literary mentality, the promoters of the literature business. He romanticized the innocence and the idealism of the Midwest, places like Superior, places where readers waited for his hope-filled books.
1947 he returned to Superior to give the graduation speech at his old normal school, now grown into a full college. It was a proud day for him, a local boy who found success in the brutal literary arena of the East. He gave a rambling speech, sentimental, avuncular. He talked about his work and his bitterness and his romantic faith.
I spend the evenings and the night reading, not because I enjoy it but because I earn my living by having opinions about books, and the only way you can have an opinion is by spending hours reading. If the book is bad, you have spent hours on a dull and unrewarding job. But what about those interesting authors? In the days when I was too lowly to be invited to the literary parties, I would imagine the high class literary conversations I missed. But conversation at literary parties I later learned ran to "How much money will I get for my next book?" --- "What do you think the sale will be?" and "How much will I get from the movies --- so and so got $150,000, I should get $250,000 if he could get that for his lousy book." Fortunately, I am a book club editor with hundreds of thousands to spend each month and I usually avoid meeting authors.
He made some exceptions:
Mr. Maugham is one of my favorite authors --- I have the greatest respect for his craftsmanship and sincerity as a writer --- though he calls me Johnny I still address him as Mr. Maugham.
He thought of Thomas Costain as his best friend. He liked Sigrid Undset. He continued:
We are people of the Midwest --- we are the heart of America --- we know America in the making --- we look to the present and the future. Most of us are somewhat this side of the angels in our thoughts and not wily as serpents. Twenty years of quiet living and believing virtue is rewarded is not fit preparation for New York. New York is not typically American . . . New York is cruel. It offers no help. There it is sink or swim. There you face the most ruthless and bitter competition. Don't be guileless enough to think you will get to the top because you have knowledge. . . . Count your blessings here.
Living and believing virtue is rewarded, looking to the future, these were the things he said he remembered about life in the Midwest, in [p. 8] Superior, in Miss Lulu Dickinson's English classes in the heart of America. Never mind that life in Superior was not always promising, that life was tough and no one could grow up in Superior without knowing about the bullies and the beatings and the brawls, the lake sailors and loggers, and the sporting girls on Tower Avenue. Perhaps it was only the childhood illusion of goodness that counted.
Or did he really believe the things he said in that speech? "My feeling is that John probably based his speech on what he thought his midwestern audience would like to hear," said A. Milton Runyon of New York about Beecroft's speech. Runyon worked with Beecroft for many years at Doubleday and knew him well.
We are left to speculate on whose cynicism was greater.
Beecroft returned to Long Island to his endless reading. Late into the nights, drinking gin, he read on and on, looking for entertaining and hope-filled books to sell to midwestern readers. He chose Elizabeth, Captive Princess; Robert Penn Warren's World Enough and Time; Daphne du Maurier's My Cousin Rachel; Sloan Wilson's The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit --- this last title a controversial book, something of a departure from his usual practice.
Always reticent and withdrawn, he became increasingly ill tempered. At the office, he tolerated no questioning of his editorial decisions.
"When he is crossed, the mild and scholarly Beecroft charges upon his foe with the fury of a hurricane, creating such a furor that all 1opposition literally dissolves," wrote Bennett Cerf in The Saturday Review of Literature. Cerf's playful tone did not conceal the harsher judgment beneath. "As long as the membership rolls of the club keep soaring, he is the white haired favorite, the Grand Mahatma, the ruler of the roost --- and boy, does he know it!"
Some of the people who worked with Beecroft thought he was jealous of authors whose books he chose, that he wanted to write novels himself. He wrote no novels. Some thought he had special difficulties dealing with women. Perhaps he remembered the neighborhood girls back in Superior, taunting him with cries of "Willie, Willie" before they yelled at him to go home and put on a dress when he was going off to read poetry with Miss Dickinson at Pattison Park. But that was back in the Midwest where people were good, wasn't it? Perhaps he had some things confused. "He enjoyed being difficult," said a co-worker who did
Author's inscrpition for A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.
There's a tree that grows in
Brooklyn. Some people call it the
Tree of Heaven. No matter where
its seed falls, it makes a tree which
struggles to reach the sky. It grows
in boarded-up lots and out of
neglected rubbish heaps. It grows up
out of cellar gratings. It is the only
tree that grows out of cement. It
grows lushly . . . survives without
sun, water, and seemingly without
earth. It would be considered
beautiful except that there are too
many of it.
not explain the judgment, "and at times he could be extremely cruel. It would make him laugh sardonically if we created a portrait of him as a sort of benevolent literary dictator."
By the time he retired in 1962 (book club business had begun to fall --- television was on the rise) he had chosen nearly three hundred titles. He also had edited fifteen anthologies, several of them collections of stories about cats. In one, he included a story he himself wrote about Rocco, Patience, Carrie Nation, and Mr. Persephone, the four cats he and Melenda owned. Four times he chose one of his own anthologies as guild selection for December --- guild sales were highest during December, and authors or editors received a percentage of the sales. "He had what lots of people of noble feeling lack which was commercial judgment," wrote a Doubleday editor who worked with him for many years.
Beecroft was not what we think of as a literary critic. He was not a literary intellectual. If we judge from his own writings and from the opinions of his contemporaries, he was not an unusually intelligent or profound man. There is no evidence that his learning was broad or deep in any field. He was not much interested in abstractions or in theory. He was industrious, practical, shrewd, ambitious, reserved, temperamental.
He also was a sensitive man who some people described as "quiet, rather gravely courteous." He had a sure feeling for the likes and dislikes of American midwesterners, especially midwestern women of his time. Long after Beecroft' s death, a boyhood friend remembered Beecroft in Superior during the summer when he was eleven years old, going regularly to the home of the sick mother of a classmate where he would read novels aloud to her for her afternoon's entertainment. Even then he knew what fiction was for.
He believed his readers cared little for the preoccupations of literary expatriates and intellectuals --- concerns with literary form or the absurdities of dada or the despair of post-war Europe or the end of nineteenth-century romanticism. He believed midwestern women used books the way men in Superior in his boyhood used hunting, boxing, and football --- as diversions from the monotony of everyday life. Books were fantasy, excitement, escape, entertainment, hope for hard-working, middle-class women who did not have very many alternatives. He knew guild readers did not want literature that questioned the values in their lives. They were too busy for that. Literature was a comfort, a [p. 9] message that they were doing all right --- things are tough but they'll get better, America is strong, up in Michigan Andrew Bride and Mary Johnson are making it fine.
People will buy books like that.
Beecroft cared very little for the niceties of literary form. Merle Miller quoted Beecroft as saying he didn't like to choose novels with flashbacks --- most readers want a forward moving plot, he said. Something has to happen to someone. That something should be external, physical. Guild readers were not much interested in conflicts inside the mind.
few years after John Beecroft' s death in 1966, I visited Melenda Beecroft in the house on Long Island which they shared for over twenty-five years. They had no children. Surrounded by antique furniture, large oil portraits on the walls, a marble head of Shakespeare on a pedestal, several cats on the patio, Melenda talked about the way John saw his life after his retirement.
She said he had feared that after his death people would think of him only as a book seller, a pusher of popular trash. He felt he had done a great deal more than that. He was proud of the variety of choices he had made for the Literary Guild. He had given hope when people badly needed hope. He had helped make Sinclair Lewis and Somerset Maugham and Thomas Wolfe and Betty Smith household names. Unlike the expatriates who had deserted the country, he had worked to improve the cultural level of the American people. Perhaps he had given his readers some thin froth from time to time, but he had never forgotten the larger purpose of his work.
He had expected more recognition, especially from the academic world. He thought a university library in his name would be a fitting memorial for the work he had done with literature. He thought it would be appropriate if the new library building at the university in Superior were named the John W. R. Beecroft Library. But that did not happen.
The memory of John William Beecroft is fading in Superior. He is buried in the East, and no memorial buildings bear his name. On the second floor of the Jim Dan Hill Library at the University of Wisconsin-Superior, the Beecroft Room holds some of his guild papers and a few posters he brought back from Russia. Shelves on one wall hold a nearly complete set of his guild selections and some bound volumes of Wings. The room is small and dark. Months go by and no one opens the door.
Maybe we should look at Beecroft's work again. Maybe we owe him that in return for all he did to bring entertainment and hope to the nation half a century ago.
Photos courtesy the John Beecroft Collection, Jim Dan Hill Library , University of Wisconsin-Superior.
A suggestion.
Go to your library. You'll almost certainly find Elliot Paul's The Last Time I Saw Paris,Betty Smith's A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, and Samuel Shellabarger's Captain from Castile. These were three of Beecroft's most popular choices in the late days of World War II.
Check the books out.
Start by reading The Last Time I Saw Paris. This is not what at first you would expect a Beecroft selection to be. This is a series of journal entries and letters recording details of daily life on a street in Paris where Elliot Paul lived between 1925 and the beginning of World War II. It is a light personal history. The book is initially playful, full of curious people and scenes. Maybe you'll enjoy the description of the laundry that doubles as a whore house. By the time the book reaches 1929, the good life on the street has begun to come apart. This is an earthy book. Elliot is not a skillful prose stylist, but he cares about the people and the places he describes. I think the book is worth your time.
Pick up A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. This was John Beecroft's selection for September 1943. It sold over 4,000,000 copies, huge sales for that time, and it is the ideal guild book. It is the story of an Irish Catholic girl named Francie Nolan growing up in immigrant poverty in Brooklyn during the years before World War I. Immigrant families on her street are trying to forge a mesh between the old world and the new ways. Francie's mother scrubs floors. Her singing father dies. All the children are hungry. They save pennies in a soup can nailed to the floor. They are good and honest, brave and hard working, and they must survive many challenges. At the end everything is changed by a rich politician who marries Francie's widowed mother. Only in America could this happen. Foolish and romantic and sentimental as it is, it retains even now an innocence and vitality and excitement that make you feel good about life. It is a book full of hope.
Finally, read Samuel Shellabarger's Captain from Castile, a very long book. Spain an the New World in the sixteenth century are described by a friendly narrator who rides along beside you. He explains, cautions, instructs as you go among wenches, Indian kings, villains, sword fights, loyal servants, beautiful virgins, evil inquisitors. ("The Inquisition," whispers the narrator, in case you are a Catholic and uncertain about how these terrible people could exist in a Catholic society, "represented the very reverse of Catholic, a peculiar Spanish development, narrow, local, fanatic; a parasite repudiated by traditional Catholic thought then as well as since.") That out of the way, you can go on with a clear conscience to the horrible pain inflicted by the dread strappado. The sawtooth structure of this book makes it ideal if you, like many busy readers in 1944, have only a few minutes at a time for reading. You can put it down any time and then pick it up later with no great loss of focus; each chapter is largely self contained and you don't have to remember too much from one episode to another.
What do you think? L.J.H.
• Obituary, The New York Times, 22 Sep 1966
John William Richard Beecroft was born in Superior, Wisconsin on June 22, 1902 to John and Theresa (Batz) Beecroft. Young "Willie" spent his school years in Superior's public schools and graduated in 1917 from Superior's Central High School. Beecroft was interested in history, theater, and literature, in part because of the influence of his English teacher, Lulu Dickinson. Instead of pursuing a literary career, however, he chose a practical route and in 1921 obtained his teaching certificate from the Superior State Normal School. He spent a year teaching in Duluth, Minnesota, but apparently the work did not suit him. He left Wisconsin for New York in 1923.
Beecroft spent three years in New York before moving to Europe. During that time he earned an A.B. degree in literature from Columbia University (1924), spent time as a bit player on Broadway, and wrote for Crowell Publishing Company. In 1927, Beecroft joined a growing population of American expatriates in France, but was not destined to remain among them. He attended the Sorbonne and traveled to Italy, but decided to return to America in 1928.
Back in New York, Beecroft found a position as a junior editor with the newly formed Literary Guild. Among his other duties, Beecroft edited the montly magazine for members: Wings. Unfortunately, the Depression caused the Guild to cut jobs and Beecroft joined the unemployed. During this period he traveled to Russia and upon return to the U.S., worked for the Paramont Newsreel. In 1933, the Literary Guild was reorganized and Beecroft was rehired. In 1937 he became editor-in-chief, a job he held until 1960.
Beecroft's tenure as editor-in-chief spanned nearly 23 years and during this time he chose every one, almost 300, of the Literary Guild "selection of the month" titles. His upbeat, readable, and entertaining selections helped increase the membership of the Guild, which in turn helped to propel his choices into national best sellers. Amont those titles are such classics as Rebeeca, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Anna and the King of Siam, To Kill a Mockingbird, and The Face of a Nation. Beecroft rarely chose nonfiction works, but when he did he chose winners such as Madame Curie.
Beecroft retired from the Guild in 1962. He died Sept. 21, 1966.
Recommended Readings:
* Hertzel, L. (1976, September). Popular Culture and the Book Clubs. Wisconsin Academy Review, 22.
* Hertzel, L. (1993, Summer). John Beecroft and the Literature Business. Wisconsin Academy Review, 39, 4-9.
* John Beecroft. (1946, July 27). Saturday Reviw of Literature, 29(28), ?-?
* John Beecroft. (1954). Current Biography 1954.
* John Beecroft. (1948, May/June). Harper's.
* John Beecroft. Contemporary Authors.
* John Beecroft. Who's Who in America, 1952-53
JOHN WR BEECROFT, BOOK CLUB EDITOR
John WR Beecroft, former editor in chief of the Literary Guild of America, died here today after a short illness. He was 64 years old and lived on Norfolk ...
Parents
Father: John Beecroft
Mother: Theresa "Tessie" Batz
Spouses and Children
1. *Melenda Pollen Schmidt
Marriage:
Status: