KENNETH LITTAUER - TYPED LETTER SIGNED 04/05/1937 - HFSID 55631

THE FICTION EDITOR OF "COLLIER'S" WRITES TO ONE OF MARGARET MITCHELL'S FIRST BOOK REVIEWERS REGARDING A VISIT TO ATLANTA, THE HOME OF THE AUTHOR OF GONE WITH THE WIND
 
KENNETH LITTAUER. TLS: "Kenneth Littauer" as Fiction Editor, 1p, 5½x8½. New York City, 1937 April 5. On letterhead of Collier's to Mr. Edwin Granberry, Rollins College, Winter Park, Florida. Begins: "Dear Granberry". In full: "Thanks for your letter. I am not sure but I think I shall be in Atlanta within a fortnight. I'll let you know what happens. Let me see that story when it is ready but don't hurry it. It is always better to make a thing stick the first time. All the best to you and Mrs. Granberry. Sincerely yours". KENNETH LITTAUER, who died in 1968, was the fiction editor at "Collier's" and a New York literary agent whose clients included F. Scott Fitzgerald, Kurt Vonnegut and James Salter. Littauer was also one of the early sponsors of the Civil Air Patrol. EDWIN GRANBERRY (1897-1988), an award-winning author of books and short stories and a professor at Rollins College, was also a free-lance book reviewer for the New York "Evening Sun". After receiving an advance copy of Margaret Mitchell's American Civil War epic, Gone With the Wind, he had written one of the first glowing reviews of the book on the day of its publication, June 30, 1936. Granberry and his wife, MABEL, had first met Mitchell and her husband, advertising executive JOHN MARSH, at Blowing Rock, North Carolina, the summer campus of Florida's Rollins College, and they became close friends and frequent correspondents. Mitchell had married Marsh in 1925, shortly before she began her book, which won the 1937 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (in May 1937, the month after this letter) and was made into an award-winning feature film in 1939. An article by Granberry, "The Private Life of Margaret Mitchell", written at Mitchell's request when she was overwhelmed by attention after the publication of her novel, appeared in "Collier's" on March 13, 1937, less than a month before this letter. Lightly creased with folds, not at signature. Staple holes at upper blank margin. Fine condition.