Address Unknown Kressman Taylor

FOREWORD

IN THIS DRAMATIC SERIES OF LETTERS (between an American living in San Francisco and his former business partner who returned to Germany) American writing has been enriched by one of those rarities in the field of literature, a perfect short story. Further, it is one of those inevitable stories, so significantly conceived and so naturally expressed that both the average reader and the professional author are likely to experience a kindred shocked reaction: “Why, I could have written that. Why didn’t I think of that before!” In every work of genius, says Goethe reflectively, we recognize our own rejected thoughts.

Kressmann Taylor, the author, is a woman. She is a wife, and the mother of three children. Between 1926 and 1928 she was an advertising copy writer. Since then, except for times when she has had occasional satirical verses in periodicals, she has considered herself a “housewife” and not a writer.

Address Unknown springs out of a background, she says, of reality. It is based upon a few actual letters. And in discussion of these letters with her husband, Elliott Taylor, the idea of this story emerged, its finished form, she generously says, owing perhaps as much to her husband and his enthusiasm as to herself. Thus, from the first, it would seem, Address Unknown took on a kind of communal or social quality.

In a country of several hundred thousand short story writers, a country in which the short story is a popular and traditional, even a common and often extremely vulgar literary form, it is unusual for one short story by an unheard-of author to awaken the widespread interest of Address Unknown. Its publication in Story met with a public reaction rare in the eight-years’ history of that literary magazine, for within ten days the entire printing of that issue was sold out. The ensuing demand, which could not be fulfilled, saw the even more unusual phenomenon of some appreciative readers (this was in Hollywood) running off mimeographed copies of the story, at their own expense, for their friends. Walter Winchell described it as “the best piece of the month, something you shouldn’t miss,” and The Readers’ Digest printed a condensation for its more than three million readers.

Motion-picture producers began wiring east. It was ordered by English publishers and translation into foreign languages was begun. At about this point it seemed Address Unknown ought to have a good substantial binding on it and its own independent, and perhaps permanent, place on the country’s bookshelf. This is it. On a shelf of significance there seems no doubt it will hold a challenging place.

—WHIT BURNETT , editor of Story Magazine

Note to the electronic edition: Address Unknown first appeared in 1938 in the literary magazine Story. The foreword below appeared in its first separate book publication the following year. Curiously, although the story remains popular in French, German, and other languages, the original has largely been forgotten in the United States, as has the author, Kathrine Kressmann Taylor (1903-1997), who suppressed her first name when Address Unknown was first published in deference to the common prejudice against woman writers who chose “masculine” themes and genres. Although one can quibble with historical details, the story is surprisingly accurate for its time in its portrayal of the fate of Jews in the Third Reich.