Traditionally, publishing was closed to Jews (except at menial and dead-end levels). All the old firms—Harper & Brothers, Scribner’s, Doubleday, Houghton Mifflin, Putnam’s—were solidly white and largely Protestant, and their output tended to be carefully conservative. That began to change in 1915 when a young Jewish man named Alfred A. Knopf, the son of an advertising executive, started the imprint that still bears his name.
