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SIGNATURES
Identified individuals are represented by a biographical sketch, a list of connections to other signatures, and, in most cases, an artifact from the Ransom Centers collections. Help us identify more signatures by submitting your suggested identification.
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THE DOOR
Location on door: front, panel 1
JOHN CHIPMAN FARRAR
The Vermont-born publisher John C. Farrar (1896-1974) is best known for founding two companies, Farrar, Rinehart (1926) and Farrar, Straus and Company (1946), which still operates today as Farrar, Straus and Giroux. His career began when he was a student at Yale, where he wrote plays and poetry and edited a collection of student verse; in 1919 he won the Yale Younger Poets Prize for his volume Forgotten Shrines. After serving in World War I and finishing his degree soon after, Farrar moved to New York and became a central figure in the Greenwich Village literary scene. In 1921 he was hired by publisher George H. Doran, for whom he edited the Bookman, a magazine that had a powerful influence over the careers of many writers who signed the bookshop door. Farrar was well-liked among writers for his generous, sociable personality, characteristics that served him well in his long career. When Doran sold the Bookman to Burton Rascoe and Seward B. Collins in 1927, Farrar started his own publishing company with Stanley Rinehart. Farrar's work in the literary community went well beyond his immediate professional responsibilities. In 1922, he helped to form the first American center of the writers' organization P.E.N, and in 1926, he and Robert Frost began the Breadloaf Writers' Conference at Middlebury College.
Images from Gloria Swanson's copy of John Farrar's A Song for Parents (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1922), with tipped-in poem, "A Valentine for Gloria," and inscription to Swanson and her children
Gloria Swanson was a wildly popular star of silent films when Farrar gave her this volume.