“Even if the work had come to light five years ago, when the subject was timely,” the reader wrote, “I don’t see that there would have been a chance for it.” That book—so five years ago—was The Diary of Anne Frank, which Knopf rejected, alongside Orwell, Nabokov, Sartre, Baldwin, Plath, Borges, Nin, Pearl S. Buck, and Isaac Bashevis "Poland and the rich Jews again" Singer.