ABSTRACT
This chapter examines in closer detail the ways in which transactions for French rights to different categories of American works were carried out by Hoffman. Considering the bulk of the demands between 1946 and 1955 from French publishers, and the majority of French rights contracts negotiated by Hoffman, one might choose to classify the contracts along the lines of "brows", as the categories of lowbrow, middlebrow, and highbrow took on a particular significance in the late 1940s, when Russell Lynes and Dwight MacDonald articulated these concepts most forcefully. From a cultural historian's viewpoint, Beth Luey has shown that the very idea of middlebrow was passing in the 1960s. The chapter also presents an overview of books from a publisher's—or an agent's—point of view, that is, considering the target readership. Thus, the chapter considers three specific categories of books: the literary, the midlist novel, and detective/hardboiled fiction.
