![]() ![]() According to Leonard Marcus, the editor saw Gág’s drawings and approached her to ask her to write a children’s book. She had a few well-attended shows, and at one of them, was “discovered” by a young editor at a publishing house that had just formed its children’s publishing team. She was an artist and printmaker who moved to New York to in the hopes that it would improve her career. Wanda Gág took a slightly different path. She published a rather serious adult novel immediately following An Old Fashioned Girl, but it wasn’t nearly as successful as her books for children, and she wouldn’t try to write another adult book under her own name again, instead trying out different pen names and publishing anonymously. She did, eventually, get that higher royalty rate, but I don’t think she ever reconciled herself to writing for children. When Alcott, on the success of Little Women, asked for a higher royalty rate on her next book, her publisher, as Leonard says played “mercilessly on Alcott’s self-doubt and grimly the worst for An Old-Fashioned Girl, he reminded her that as a ‘second class storyteller’ she ‘ought not to expect more….Surely you don’t want an additional percentage on a failure.’” Alcott’s opinion of her own genre (and her own writing!) was so low that she was talked out of the higher paycheck that she dearly needed. ![]() In Minders of Make-Believe, Marcus tells a story about Alcott’s publisher taking advantage of her low opinion of her own work. ![]()
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