My Years with Ludwig von Mises.pdf - The Ludwig von Mises Institute

CHAPTER'VIII
I SHOULD know Human Action very well. I typed 890 pages of it,
and after the index was finished,·I checked it. Lu was a very strict
"boss." Atleast with me. Whenever he saw a typing error, he made
me redo the whole page, exactly as I had to do at the Delehanty
School of Business. Erasing was strictly prohibited there, and so it
was withLu.
It is no news to most of my readers that Human Action is the
English revised edition of Nationaloekonomie, published in Geneva
in 1940. Two years later, when we were settled in our new
apartment in New York, Lu started planning on a revised English
edition. He worked on it for many years. Each day I could type
only a certain number of pages, as my days were fi~led with many
other tasks. That is how I came to live with Human Action, as well
as with Lu. It was part of my life as well as his, and I shared all the
joy and the disappointments that the coming years brought.
Human Action meant more to Lu than all the work he did before
or after, and therefore he suffered more by the maltreatment of his
work by the Yale University Press when they published the second
edition than he had ever suffered before. But I don't want to anticipate
events; I shall describe them chronologically and thus make it
easier for the reader to understand how the book was created, how
many difficulties there were to overcome until it was finally
printed, and the real suffering Lu had to go through when he saw
Human Action, the most important contribution of his creative
life, mutilated in its second edition.
Lu's first contact with Yale University Press involved his OmnipotentGovernment,
and he was directed to Yale by Henry Hazlitt.
When I look through the files I see more clearly than ever how
much Henry Hazlitt has done-and is still doing-to spread my
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