In 30 years of publishing, George Robertson had never met an author as astonishing as Zora Cross. Her book Songs of Love and Life was a publishing event in 1917: a young woman with literary talent writing about sex. Soldiers took it to the trenches and many newspaper inches were devoted to the author’s genius and daring. Robertson believed Zora Cross would endure as a household name alongside Shakespeare and Rossetti. A prolific letter writer, Cross filled archives with evidence of her daily life and professional ambitions. These letters, dating from childhood, allow us to get closer to her than to other writers whose work has better withstood the twentieth century’s literary assessment. This paper examines the relationship between one writer and publisher — gleaned from a large cache of letters mostly from Cross to Robertson — to evoke the broader experience of Australian authors in the early twentieth century.