ABSTRACT
The Second World War certainly disrupted publishing in France, as well as in the United States. In France, men and women did not experience the war in exactly the same ways: following the death of her husband in 1939, Jenny Bradley resumed the agency’s activity, and continued to work during the conflict; as for Michel Hoffman, he had enlisted in the French army. Following his demobilization after the June and July debacle, he spent most of the later years of the war in the South, where he eventually met his wife. There is evidence that he joined the Résistance, where he met French writer Joseph Kessel, also of Jewish Russian origins. Resuming his activity in 1944, he returned to Paris after it had been liberated in August of that year, and soon took stock of the morally disastrous situation of French publishing. The war had wrought many changes, material, psychological, and political, on French publishing, but it also modified the outlook of US publishers on international markets. Whereas they had not been particularly preoccupied with these markets before, wartime experiments such as the Council on Books in Wartime, and the creation of the American Book Publishers’ Bureau opened the eyes of US publishers to new lucrative potentialities abroad.
