CARL SANDBURG - AUTOGRAPH 01/15/1942 CO-SIGNED BY: ELEANOR ROBSON BELMONT, KATHERINE GARRISON CHAPIN, MARTHA KELLER - HFSID 85708

CARL SANDBURG, CO-SIGNED BY: ELEANOR ROBSON BELMONT, MARTHA KELLER and KATHERINE GARRISON CHAPIN
Guestbook page signed and dated by Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Carl Sandburg in 1942. Also signed and dated between 1941 and 1944 by poets Martha Keller and Katherine Garrison Chapin and by actress and playwright Eleanor Robson Belmont
Signatures: "Martha Keller - November 6, 1941", "Carl Sandburg/Jan 15/1942", "Eleanor Robson Belmont/Oct 31-1942" and, on verso, "To the welcoming little/house, and room and/hostess - who is Poetry ./Katherine Garrison Chapin/Nov 21- 1944-" in blue and black inks. With three unknown signatures. 2 pages, 5¼x8¼, binder holes at left edge. American historian and author SANDBURG (1878-1967), also a folklorist and poet, published his first book of poems, Chicago Poems, in 1916, while working as a reporter at the Chicago Daily News. He continued to publish books of poetry during the 1920s while writing two extensive biographies of Abraham Lincoln, The Prairie Years(1926, two volumes) and The War Years (1939, four volumes). Sandburg, who won the 1940 Pulitzer Prize for History for the latter volume, won another Pulitzer in 1951 for Complete Poems. He was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1964. British-born American actress BELMONT (1879-1979) was a successful American actress whose career on Broadway (1900-1909) took off with Merely Mary Ann (1903-1904). She retired after marrying American banker August Belmont, Jr. in 1910 and threw herself into philanthropy for the next five decades. After retiring, she wrote the Broadway play In the Next Room (1923-1924) and the book The Case of the Black Parrot, both of which were adapted into movies. She also organized the Metropolitan Opera Guild in 1935 to help finance the Metropolitan Opera. CHAPIN (1890-1977) was a prolific poet who published from the 1930s to the 1970s. She was one of the original Fellow in American Letters of the Library of Congress, and a number of her poems were set to music by the Philadelphia Orchestra and New York Philharmonic Orchestra, including Lament for the Stolen, a poem on the Charles Lindbergh baby kidnapping first performed in 1938; the civil rights poem And They Lynched Him from a Tree, first performed in 1940; and Plain Chant for America, first performed in 1941. Chapin was also a translator and playwright. KELLER (1902-1971) wrote historic poems. She published two books of poetry - Mirror to Mortality (1937) and Brady's Bend and Other Ballads (1946) - and the children's books War Whoop of the Wily Iroquois (1954). Lightly toned and creased. Unknown signature touches Keller's signature. Show-through touches signatures. Lightly discolored along edges. Otherwise in fine condition.