STORY

THE ONLY MAGAZINE DEVOTED
SOLELY TO THE SHORT STORY

EDITORS:
WHIT BURNETT
MARTHA FOLEY

POETZLEINSDORFERSTR. 16
(XVIII) VIENNA
AUSTRIA

Feb. 21, 1932

William Carlos Williams,
9 Ridge Road,
Rutherford, N. J.

Dear Mr. Williams,

We were very much pleased to
receive your little story A Difficult Man.
Happily it arrived just when there
was space for it and we are using it
in the current No. 6, a copy of which
will be sent you when it comes out of
the print shop Feb. 24.

We have both read quite a
few of your stories. The baby piece in
a recent Pagany impressed us and we
were on the verge of writing you when
your hard-boiled man walked in.

What is the situation
with Contact? Has it appeared yet?
Are you people favorable to exchange
ads? We are exchanging this month
with transition and next or thereafter
expect to exchange with Hound and Horn
and several others.

With best wishes,

STORY and THE STORY PRESS

432 FOURTH AVENUE • NEW YORK • MURRAY HILL 4-7530

EXECUTIVE OFFICES

June 4, 1942

Dear Mr. Williams:

I am undertaking an anthology to contain the best writing in America by the greatest American writers - novelists, poets, essayists, playwrights, etc. - based upon their own self-chosen selections of what they consider their own best work. I am planning to make this a very comprehensive and distinguished book of American writing, omitting no contemporary of stature. The book will run about 1000 pages with excerpts from about sixty to eighty authors.

This book should certainly include a unit of your own work which in your estimation represents you at your best and has a unity of its own which, with a minimum of explanation, will be able to stand up as a complete work of art in such a book. In view of the large number of contributors, I am hoping to keep poets represented in most cases under 2000 words. It would be very helpful and in the end revealing, too, if with your selection you could give me a paragraph or two saying why you favor this particular choice.

The reactions of authors so far approached have been extremely rewarding and enlightening. They have surveyed their output with a view to selecting something that is very dear to themselves personally and, at the same time, representative of themselves at their best. Contributions have already been received from Sandburg, Steinbeck, Buck, Millay, Sinclair Lewis, Van Wyck Brooks, Carl Van Doren, Robert Frost, Thornton Wilder, Van Loon, Mencken, Stephen Vincent Benet, Theodore Dreiser, Robert Sherwood, Sherwood Anderson, Dorothy Canfield Fisher, Maxwell Anderson, Louis Adamic, Eugene O'Neill, John

STORY and THE STORY PRESS

EXECUTIVE OFFICES

(2)

Dewey, George Santayana, Upton Sinclair, Irvin Cobb, John Gunther, Robert Nathan, William Saroyan, Erskine Caldwell, Henry Seidel Canby, James Thurber, Archibald MacLeish, George Jean Nathan, Robinson Jeffers, James Farrell, Katherine Anne Porter, Kay Boyle, and many others.

The publisher of the book will be the Dial Press and ↕ will be the editor, and it is hoped to get the book in shape for the late fall and Christmas sale. The publishers have agreed to pay a reprint fee of twenty-five dollars, on publication, as an advance on royalties to be shared equally among the contributors. In addition, the editor has also arranged that there will be a royalty shared by the contributors in case the book is a book-club choice or dividend.

In view of the large number of contributors, the sum to go back to each author probably will not, at any time, make you rich, but the publishers feel a book of this kind, intelligently selected and produced, with the best co-operation of the distinguished list of American authors now living, will make this a book of lasting value in America and of particular interest at this period of transition when such a repository of our best writers' best thought would be more than unusually welcome.

 ↕ would be delighted to hear from you, as soon as possible, as to your own selection of your best writing.*

*published or unpublished