BR TO W.W. NORTON & COMPANY, INC. / WARDER NORTON, 12 NOV. 1936
BRACERS 47177. ALS. Norton papers, Columbia U.
Proofread by K. Blackwell and A. Duncan

<letterhead>
Telegraph House
Harting, Peterfield.1
12.11.36

Dear Warder

I have today received your letter of Nov. 2, and I think your reasoning is sound. I have decided not to publish the Peace Book in America. You will remember that I expressed doubts from the first. (I started to write a book on a different topic, but it became this as I wrote.)

I am much afraid my day is past in America. In Praise of Idleness has sold enormously here, and the Peace Book is also going very well; but in America, it seems to me, a Radical is not allowed by fashion to be anti-communist.

You need not have been afraid I should be hurt by your letter; I am afraid, though, that you are vexed by all these complications. I wish I could see you, but it is too intolerably tedious to go into everything by letter — It was not a question of “two different books”, but that the book I wrote was not what Macmillan’s expected.

Virginia Woolf considers the book on my parents the most interesting she has read for years; but unfortunately as they are publishing it her opinion has no publicity value.

Shaw has given Allen and Unwin a puff of Freedom and Organization. Would it be any use to you?

All well here. Best wishes to you and Polly.

Yours sincerely
Bertrand Russell.

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