5/8/2023 0 Comments 84 charing cross road summaryFrank is more decorous and restrained, but any English writer would be in contrast to such a sparky American. She and the shop’s manager, Frank Doel, began a correspondence that is so lively on her part that it jumps off the page. She was a passionate Anglophile, and wanted to have real English books that she could afford rather than pay a fortune for horrible American reprints. In 1946, an impoverished book-lover scraping a living in New York, Helene Hanff started to order obscure books of English literature from the London firm of Marks & Co. It was so successful because it is a book of instantly readable, delightful, funny, moving, revealing, instructive and downright normal letters. It became a TV series and a highly successful West End play (but flopped on Broadway). 84 Charing Cross Road was published in 1970, and was an instant success. She spent her life trying to become a Broadway playwright, and ended up writing a best-selling novel about her relationship with a London antiquarian bookshop from the 1940s to the 1960s. Today’s letter in the first Really Like This Book’s podcast A-Z series is H, and today’s author is Helene Hanff (1916-97), oh blessed be her name.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |