My Mother and Faustina Orner

Abstract This essay is an account of a remarkable series of letters written by a New York literary agent (Faustina Orner, 1899 – 1988) to the author's mother (Madge Rosalind Miller Tanselle, 1912 – 1997) in the early 1940s. The letters give a picture of the literary marketplace of the time, showing in the process how a successful agent handled a hopeful young writer and what she thought about the Second World War and its effect on the publishing scene. The author regards his mother's experience as emblematic of the struggles that aspiring writers have perennially endured.