Barbara Kingsolver sends her very best wishes to The Frances Goldin Literary Agency on the occasion of the organization’s 40th Anniversary.
The agency has been celebrating on its Facebook page by posting episodes from its illustrious history of books and authors. To mark Kingsolver’s long partnership with FGLA, the agency reached back to HOLDING THE LINE: Women In the Great Arizona Mine Strike of 1983 (Cornell/ILR Press, 1989). This was her first book, but the second to be published. “Working as a science writer in Tucson,” Kingsolver’s colleagues wrote, “she began covering the momentous Phelps Dodge copper mine strike as a freelancer on the weekends. Without meaning to, she began thinking of her newspaper dispatches as the beginning of a book, ‘never mind that I had no idea how to go about writing a book, no publishing contacts, nor an iota of confidence that I could carry out such a grand project.’”
That is, until she wrote a query letter to Frances Goldin, who responded “your book proposal is the kind of work which particularly interests me.” Thus began Frances and Barbara’s enthusiastic partnership, which has lasted more than thirty years.
