Horn Springs P. O.
Tennessee.

7th February, 1936.

Dear Mr. Warren---

A young man in a Nashville bookstore yesterday recommended me to the Southern Review containing your account of my book "Honey in the Horn", and I write now to say that I am very glad he did. Not merely for your pleasant words about that literary obelisk, though it does fall refreshingly on a jaded ear to find it treated as a piece of writing, with so accurate an appreciation of the problems I had to lick or compromise with to make it hang together. I liked your sizing up of all the other novels too, think you're right about them and about novel-writing in general, and think the country would be a lot farther out of the dog-house if there were a lot more such criticism.

My thanks and best wishes both to you and for the magazine.

Horn Springs,
Tennessee.

13th February, 1936.

Dear Mr. Warren---

Many thanks for inviting a contribution. I've got a longish
narrative poem that I hope to appall you with if it ever gets
done. Finishing it seems less a matter of raising its literary
value than of beating down my literary standards, but even that
takes time.

I have read more of the magazine since writing you, and find
it extremely interesting and well done. It is so much to my lik-
ing that I take the liberty of offering a suggestion which I hope
you haven't already considered and rejected. It would be extremely
interesting to me to see reprinted, alongside the writing of the
present, some parts of the old East Tennessee dialect sketches of
George Harris which were published in Nashville close to a hundred
years ago under the title "Sut Lovingood".

To my mind, these unpretentious hunks of low comedy had a
great deal of influence on the subsequent course of all writing
in and about the South. The dialect is spread on a little thick,
(not an unfamiliar failing among writers to this day) and the
writing isn't exactly what you'd call spiritual; but a lot of
the things are funny, coarseness and all. To reprint them now
would be certainly instructive, and possibly entertaining. There
is surely food for thought in the fact that East Tennessee had
produced 3 books that are still worth reading---Davy Crockett,
Haywood's Civil and Political History of Tennessee, and this one---
at a time when the rest of the South hadn't got started.

Anyhow, I hope you'll consider of it.

Horn Springs, Tennessee.

Friday, 8th May.

Dear Mr. Warren---

Many thanks for your letter---for your letters, rather, since there is one that came while I was in Virginia, and the Pulitzer stampede buste...

The poetry selection, you may notice, is much more in character; pleasant and inoffensive jingling, nothing to do with anything in particular, built for the Poets' Corner of the Literary Digest. I suppose I oughtn't to complain, but it does look as if they were trying to see how bad they could pick without being shot at.

I have shipped all my papers and rubbish to the Coast, having intended to be there by now myself before this prize thing loomed up. There is a manuscript in the wad that I had intended to send you after a few last licks; will put them on when I get moved and get things quieted down.