WILLIAM STAFFORD - AUTOGRAPH LETTER SIGNED 02/16/1983 - HFSID 206154

WILLIAM STAFFORD
His handwritten letter to a collector from his home in Lake Oswego, Oregon.
Autograph letter signed: "William Stafford", 1p, 8½x11.  Lake Oswego, Oregon, February 16, 1983. To "Dear Bob Hemmings" in full: "Just home from a reading circuit, I find your note & the poem (signed, enclosed). I'll also enclose one of the extra flyers someone made for a stay on my trip. Later, if I lay hands on some photograph I'll try to send a few. Good luck on your project. Sincerely".  William Edgar Stafford (1914-1993) was an American poet, author of over 57 volumes of poetry including West of Your City (1960), The Rescued Year (1965) and Traveling Through the Dark (1962) which won the National Book Award for Poetry. A highly literate farm boy from Kansas, Stafford achieved success late in life, having spent the majority of his early years working hard labor jobs.  During the Depression he was one of the main contributors in his household, and during WWII, declaring himself a pacifist, he was assigned to woodland work for the duration of the war, earning just $2.50 a month.  After receiving his bachelors and masters degrees from the University of Kansas, he found work as a professor at Lewis & Clark College where he taught from 1958 to 1980. With the success of Traveling Through the Dark, Stafford was later appointed Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1970.  In 1975 he was made Poet Laureate of Oregon. In his retirement from Lewis & Clark he continued to write poetry, adding to his 50 year daily journal in which he composed 20,000 poems (some 3,000 of which were published).  His last lines, written the morning he died, read, "'You don't have to / prove anything,' my mother said. 'Just be ready / for what God sends."  In 2008, the Stafford family gave his writings to the Special Collections Department at Lewis& Clark College.  He is the father of writer Kim Stafford, who published the memoir Early Morning: Remembering my Father, William Stafford. Normal mailing folds. Slightly creased. Otherwise, fine condition.