Writers House occupies two landmarked adjacent counting houses built by the brothers William Waldorf and John Jacob Astor III in 1881. 21 West 26th Street, acquired in 1979, still retains its jewel-like Victorian facade of red brick, polished granite and ornamental terracotta. 23 West 26th Street, acquired in 2001, was originally a twin building but was given a neo Federal exterior by Vincent Astor in 1921. What once served as his stately office is now our antique-paneled conference room. Both buildings contain concrete-lined walk-in vaults where the Astors, the richest and most prominent landlords in New York, stored their real estate deeds and huge rental incomes. Today these grand safes contain archival books by our authors. The history of 23 West 26th is unusual in that when Vincent Astor died he left the building to his daughter, who was married to millionaire communist, Corliss Lamont. When Lamont died, he bequeathed it to the U.S Communist party. From the mid-forties until the late fifties it served as the party's headquarters and housed its president, Gus Hall, and the editorial and publishing offices of the Communist newspaper, THE DAILY WORKER. All the while, the building was under surveillance by the FBI. It also suffered a series of fire bombings that shattered the bay windows on the ground floor and set the offices ablaze. Today, things are more peaceful. Writers House agents occupy all of 21 West 26th, including a fourth floor that was added in the early 1990s, expanding our space while maintaining the historic charm of the building. Our foreign rights department and several agent offices are located in 23 West 26, a testament to the continual expansion of our efforts to offer the most complete literary representation to our clients. Writers House is also proud to house the list of the esteemed Joan Daves agency. One of the United States's most distinguished literary agents during the second half of the twentieth century, Joan Daves was born in Germany and came to the United States at the beginning of World War II to escape Nazi Germany. After a short stint at Harper Brothers, Daves founded her own literary agency in the early 1950s, and became renowned for introducing major European writers into American literary culture. Her distinguished client list included 7 Nobel Prize winners, among them Martin Luther King Jr., whom she signed up as a client even before the first major social protests at Montgomery, as well as Elias Canetti, Heinrich Böll, Nelly Sachs, Gabriella Mistral, and Hermann Hesse. Other prominent writers included Willy Brandt, Roger Shattuck (winner of the National Book Award), Isaac Babel, Christina Stead, Bertolt Brecht, Vaclav Havel, Pavel Kohout and Frank O’Connor. She brought the works of these great authors and many more to Writers House when she joined her agency with ours in 1989. Daves passed away in 1997, and Writers House is proud to carry on her legacy.