LOUIS SIMPSON - TYPED LETTER SIGNED 05/12/1982 - HFSID 264471

LOUIS SIMPSON
Signed letter from the Pulitzer Prize winning author to a hopeful novelist, saying he looks forward to reading her work and that she seems to be off to a good start. Extremely rare!
Typed letter signed: "Louis Simpson", 1 page, 7¼x11. Port Jefferson, New York, 1982 May 12. To author Erika Holzer. In full: "It was good of you to write. I'm a terrible correspondent - some people are able to dash off a letter, but I can't. And the more I want to answer, the worse it gets. I think this is because I try to think of something worthwhile to say, whereas one should just say hello. I'm looking forward to reading Double Crossing. If this is your first published novel, you've made a good start with Harper and Row. They were my publishers once, but I didn't get along with my editor, and went to another house. There I had an editor I did get along with, and he proceeded to lose his job. So I went with him to another publishing house, and so on. My books are strewn across the landscape. So we have a storytelling mother in common. I think it's rather fine that you became a lawyer. You speak of a legal career as a 'detour,' the drama more imagined than real. I suppose so...lots of dry work, I fancy. I once took my children to the Old Bailey in London where a friend of mine, Judge Christmas Humphreys, was presiding. I warned the kids beforehand: 'Now it's not going to be very exciting. It'll be mostly a lot of technical stuff.' As it turned out, the case that came up that day was of a young man who had a quarrel with the man who lived upstairs, and had run him through with a sword. The man upstairs had survived. There were as many different versions of what happened, by other tenants in the building, as there are points of view in Roshomon. For hours on end we were glued to our seats. Surely now and then something dramatic turns up in the legal profession? There've been writer-doctors (Chekhov, William Carlos Williams). Why not writer-lawyers? Thanks again for your friendly letter, and your book." Jamaican-born American poet LOUIS SIMPSON (1923-2012) won the 1963 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for At the End of the Open Road, one of more than 17 volumes of verse he published, including The Best Hour of the Night, published in 1983, the same year as Holzer's novel, Double Crossing. In 1975, with the publication of Simpson's Three on the Tower, a study of Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot and William Carlos Williams (whom he mentions in this letter), the author won wide acclaim as a literary critic. His other books of criticism include A Revolution in Taste: Studies of Dylan Thomas, Allen Ginsberg, Sylvia Plath, and Robert Lowell (1978), A Company of Poets (1981), The Character of the Poet (1986) and Ships Going Into the Blue: Essays and Notes on Poetry (1994). Simpson, who had worked as a book editor at a publishing house in New York early in his career, later taught at Columbia, the University of California at Berkeley and the State University of New York at Stony Brook. Lawyer turned author ERIKA HOLZER wrote two novels, Double Crossing (1983), a human rights espionage drama, and Eye for an Eye (1994), which was filmed in 1996. She sought endorsements for her 1983 novel from prominent writers of the day. Lightly creased. Lightly soiled at blank right margin. Irregularly cut left edge. Corners slightly worn and creased. Normal mailing folds. Otherwise, fine condition.