Pantheon Books was founded in 1942 in Kurt and Helen Wolff's small Washington Square apartment. Together with a partner, Jacques Schiffrin, founder of the Bibliotheque de la Pleiade, who handled the French output and much of the early book design, Wolff at first published mainly twentieth century European literature in translation. "Pioneer work" is what he called the transplantation of Goethe, Mörike, Stefan George, and Hermann Broch, along with French writers such as Charles Peguy and Paul Valery, into American and English. Several of these were dual-language editions and one, Broch's Der Tod des Virgil (The Death of Virgil), was published simultaneously in both German and English. In 1953 he returned to this pattern with one of the earlies comprehensive translations of Hölderlin's poetry into English.
After pulling out of Pantheon in 1960, Wolf joined Harcourt-Brace, publishing under a joint imprint with his wife, Helen Wolff, who continued there after his death in 1963.
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