VAN WYCK BROOKS - AUTOGRAPH LETTER SIGNED 08/22/1953 - HFSID 273208

VAN WYCK BROOKS
The historian and biographer writes a letter from his home in Bridgewater, Connecticut
 ALS: "Van Wyck Brooks", 4p, 5½x8½, conjoined leaves. Bridgewater, Connecticut, 1953 August 22 [question mark written after day by Brooks]. To "Dear Ted". In part [some is illegible]: "What a lovely & wonderful letter - so many thanks indeed!  - but how sorry I am that you had a stroke in June. I do hope it was a very minor one & that all traces of it have now disappeared...Some one told me, I can't remember who, that I have you to thank for the degree. I do indeed thank you, I for much else besides, I wish I might look forward to many many hours with you. It's odd, but I used to think that when people reach our age they had leisure & time for everything. How untrue that is. Life seems to be up a hill all the way, with more and more pressure to contend with every year. Not that I have anything to complain of, I [two words illegible] manage to meet before too long. Your letter was delightful, [illegible] your remarks that the upper-case U's. I hadn't noticed that peculiarity of my favorite type-face, it is [illegible] Fairfield I my friend Rudolph Ruzicka designed it, - he has come home in Boston at 57 P[illegible] street. But I am not using it in my next book, so that's one care the less. What a good story but [illegible] That shant (sic) be published. Of course he is an [word crossed out] actor through & through - his acting = his bones, - otherwise, as you say, we [illegible] acted = in dark. I was [illegible] unfair to him, though I had no personal grievance against him, & I well know that he [illegible] a kind [illegible] - I should have realized that you knew John Sloan & should have known him better. The [illegible] - You did the artists' colonies' - but he always lived in them, being the most innocently person of men. - we must [illegible] at [two words illegible] in late summer. Oh, no, when I come thinking it! That, for one, was [two words illegible] (1905 - just after my freshman year. I was [two words illegible], dear Ted, why aren't you writing You [illegible] you have surely had a most exciting & interesting life. - I am [illegible] at present = a second Tieny(?) & Portraits, this time about the 1920s. - Whew! I must hurry! To catch the mail! But I so much want to see you! Love your". In the year of this letter, Brooks published The Writer in America, a response to criticism that his literary histories failed to discriminate between important and lesser writers on the basis of literary skill. The previous year, he had published The Confident Years, the final volume of his "Makers and Finders" series of American cultural and literary history. One of his books in the series, The Flowering of New England, 1815-1865, published in 1936, won the Pulitzer Prize. Van Wyck Brooks (1886-1963) is best known as a literary historian and biographer. His books include The Wine of the Puritans (1909), America's Coming of Age (1915), The Ordeal of Mark Twain (1920), The Pilgrimage of Henry James (1925), New England Indian Summer: 1865-1915 (1940), On Literature Today (1941), The World of Washington Irving (1944) and The Time of Melville and Whitman (1947). Brooks was a longtime resident of Bridgewater, Connecticut, which dedicated a wing in the city library to him. Lightly creased with folds, vertical fold at the first "o" of Brooks. Minor ink transference at some words, light show through of writing. Slightly soiled at blank margins. Overall, fine condition.