Stanley Went

Stanley Went was born in England, and educated at Wyggeston Grammar School, Leicester, of which his father was the Headmaster. He taught Latin in this school for a short time, and then went as Exhibitioner to St. John’s College, Oxford. He graduated in 1905 (Second in Greats).

After a little while he came to America, and became man aging editor of Bellman in Minneapolis, and thence to New York as a free-lance editorial writer for the Evening Post and the Sun. When the First World War came along, he returned to England and was commissioned in the Leicestershire Regiment.

He came back to New York after the War, and resumed newspaper work, eventually joining one of the Rockefeller Research Organizations as Editorial Secretary. This involved travelling through the Far East to coordinate missionaries’ reports and find out what they were doing.

In 1934 he returned to England, and joined the editorial staff of Putnam & Co. Ltd., with special responsibility as the representative of G. P. Putnam’s Sons. He was a director of the London firm till his death.

He was elected to the Century in 1921, when he was forty years old, and he was one of a group of younger men who sat at the feet of Mr. Henry Holt. After the War, he came over only twice; but he had a good time on each sojourn, though he was busy with Philistine book-publishers—who were good company all the same.

In London he inhabited the Devonshire Club, whose famous port trapped many an unsuspecting publisher from overseas. When he could get away, he played golf—very good golf, too. He had a genius for making friends; and visitors from Putnam’s to London always looked him up with lively anticipations that were never disappointed. He was very popular, not only with the people he worked with but in the whole book business; and he was good at his task, and happy doing it.

George W. Martin
1957 Century Association Yearbook