Milton Waldman

• 1. Introduction

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  Milton Waldman was an American author and publisher, and he is remembered chiefly for a book he did not publish. The book was not an ordinary one. J. R. R. Tolkien wanted a single publisher to take his vast legendarium and The Lord of the Rings together, as one linked work. Waldman, a literary advisor in London, was keen on the idea. He still said no. Who was this man, and how did a Cleveland-born biographer end up deciding the fate of Middle-earth? Why did a champion of the project fail to get it printed? And what did his refusal leave behind?

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• 2. Cleveland And Yale

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  Cleveland, Ohio, was where Milton Waldman was born in 1895. He went on to study at Yale University. When the First World War came, he served in the United States Army. His first book appeared in 1925 and was called Americana. It surveyed American literature, starting from the time the first Europeans arrived. That early interest in how stories and writing accumulate over centuries would shape a career spent among books. Around 1930, he left America for London.

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• 3. Biographer Of Queens

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  Sir Walter Raleigh, published in 1928, was Waldman's first full portrait of a historical figure. He wrote another book that year, titled America Conquers Death. Then he turned toward the English court. King, Queen, Jack, from 1931, told how Philip of Spain courted Elizabeth. England's Elizabeth followed in 1933, and Joan of Arc in 1935. In 1936 came Biography of a Family, which follows Catherine de Medici and her children. His subjects were often women of power, and also rulers who held their thrones by force. Rod of Iron, from 1941, covered tyrannical English kings, and it was also issued under the title Some English Dictators. Elizabeth And Leicester appeared in 1944. Decades later, in 1972, he published The Lady Mary, about Mary Tudor.

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• 4. The London Editor

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  The London Mercury, a literary journal, gave Waldman his first post in England, as an editor. At the same time he worked as a literary advisor for the publisher Longmans, Green. In 1949 he moved to William Collins, Sons, again as a literary advisor. He rose there until he became a director of the firm. He also served as managing director of Rupert Hart-Davis Ltd. Recognition followed, and he was made a fellow of the Royal Society of Letters. He had a son and two daughters. Waldman died in London in 1976. His position at Collins, though, is what brought a very particular manuscript to his desk.

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• 5. A Real Work Of Creation

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  April 1950 was a bad month for Tolkien. He had tried to persuade Stanley Unwin, the man who had published The Hobbit, to issue The Lord of the Rings alongside a selection from his legendarium. That selection included material that later became The Silmarillion. Tolkien proposed a two-volume book. Unwin refused. But Tolkien had another option. He already knew Waldman, who had shown interest in both works. In 1949, Tolkien had sent him a manuscript of the legendarium. Waldman's verdict was generous. He called it "a real work of creation". Yet he worried about how long it was. By 1951, Tolkien decided to approach William Collins, Sons, with both books together.

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• 6. Letter 131

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  Waldman was interested in the combined proposal, but he asked Tolkien to shorten The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien answered with a long letter, numbered 131 in the published collection. His aim was to convince Collins that the two works were "interdependent and indivisible". The letter laid out the foundations and ambitions of his writing. It then gave a compressed history of the whole story, running from the creation through the First, Second and Third Ages. It closed with a reference to The Hobbit and a lengthy outline of The Lord of the Rings. The Tolkien scholar Colin Duriez, writing about the 10,000-word letter, called it "one of the best keys to the extraordinary legendarium". Whether the editors at Collins would read it as Waldman hoped was another matter.

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• 7. The Price Of Paper

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  Waldman stayed enthusiastic, but the editors at Collins did not share his feeling, and further delays followed. The obstacle was money. The work was enormous, and paper was expensive at the time. Together, those two facts made the cost of publishing it very large. In April 1952, Collins refused. A man who admired the legendarium and the novel had been overruled by the arithmetic of printing. That same year, Waldman's own Queen Elizabeth appeared in the Brief Lives series, a short book on a subject he had already written about at length.

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