3201 MONUMENT AVENUE
RICHMOND, VIRGINIA

Dear Dr. Canby:

If it were possible, I would very gladly undertake an article such as you outline concerning Mr. Sohoen's Art and Beauty. But I am just out of bed, after some two weeks' agonizing over an abscess in the ear, and it will be another two weeks, they tell me, before my head is in fair shape.

I am the more sorry for that I delighted in the first half of the book, and rather cordially raged against the second half. I would honestly like to write something more or less concerning this Art and Beauty. But, in this muggy deafness, writing calls for a concentration which is beyond me.

I am hoping, none the less, that you may later afford me the chance to attain the eminence of a reviewer.

12 May 1932

3201 MONUMENT AVENUE
RICHMOND: VIRGINIA

My dear Canby:

After thinking it over rather carefully, I prefer not to write about the collected prose of Elinor Wylie. To begin with, I have already done this, more or less, in an article published some four years ago, and I need not mention the reviewers who before to-day have charged me with repetititiousness. In the second place, I appear uniquely obtuse, in that I like her prose tremendously and do not care, either one way or the other, about her verse. It follows that I, obviously, do not understand the true merits of Elinor Wylie, and would do well not to discuss them.

Thank you none the less for wanting
me to write about the book -- and believe me

16 November 1933

Dear Dr. Canby:

Necessarily I had delayed until the
Review operated on my latest book, before
writing you as to The Age of Confidence.
You have done here, I know, a most heart-warming
piece of work, for us who have reached a certain
age, in the same time, I think, that you were
compiling what ought to be for our juniors an
invaluable source book. The entire era of a
special class is so very much all there, in
260 not lengthy pages; and I purred over them.

I regard, for example, the sentence, "The
girls would not or could not play their parts,
and we could write ours better than we could
act them." One has to be quite fifty to
understand that so simple seeming statement.
But there is in it the material for a volume, as
go both my belief and my recollections.

In brief, you have on The Age of Confidence
my most hearty congratulations. Circumstances
over which, as they say, I have no control
compel me either to give up writing or else to
dismiss you as a negligible critic of current
letters; nor do I mean to give up writing: and
yet somehow, whenever you write about the past,
as here and in Classic Americans, I discover
the somewhat awkward traces of our fundamental
agreement. What the moral may be, I have no
least notion.

24 November 1934

Dear Dr. Canby:

Your letters always delight me, on
one ground or another. Yet your recent
suggestion, as to my submitting to the
Review a poem or group of poems (while in
itself flattering and cordially appreciated
by me), is not wise, I fear, from any practical
standpoint. You see, I have figured in the
Review for so long and so uninterruptedly as a
doddering imbecile that for you to be printing
a contribution by me really would give you an
air of not taking your reviewers quite seriously.
That would never do. And moreover, now I think
of it, not for long years have I written any
verses except for the lowly utilitarian purpose
of dedicating this or the other book with an
acrostic.

In brief, I can but combine a regretful
refusal with the despatch of my sincere
personal regards -- and remain

Yours faithfully,

12 October 1935

James Branch CabelI

Please mark personal care
of Writers project, 1500 Eye
Street " Washington,

Septemher 23, 1947

My dear Miss Loveman

I am sorry that † did not answer your earlier but † was travelling and cannot locate your †katz letter. † shall be most happy to review the book written by a labor spy. perhaps † am too late in responding. If so I shall understand it if you have given the book to someone else in the meantime.

BANK OF AMERICA
BANK OF AMERICA
BANK OF AMERICA
EXPERIENCE
EXPERTISE
EXCELLENCE

December 8, 1939

Dear Mr. Stevens:

I enclose a photograph of the old house at Columbus, Georgia, now called 'St. Elmo' by the proud owner, and often pointed out as Augusta Jane Evans' birth-place, as the original of Le Bocage in her novel, and as the place where St. Elmo was written. However, the truth is that Augusta Jane was born in a small tenant house on the same estate, and her family moved from there when she was ten. As the house belonged to her uncle and aunt, she did undoubtedly visit there later, and may have written some of her book there.

The post cards show her three homes in Mobile. My correspondent has written descriptions on the back of each, but the are not well adapted to reproduction. The only one now in existence is the one marked number 1, one story, but an interesting example of an old-time plantation house with immense doors and windows.

Mr. George Stevens
Editor, The Saturday Review
420 Madison Avenue
New York