BATES KATHARINE LEE Autograph Manuscript Signed

Sale 2228 - Lot 2

Price Realized: $ 11,400

?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price

Estimate: $ 10,000 - $ 15,000

"AMERICA THE BEAUTIFUL" BATES, KATHARINE LEE. Autograph Manuscript Signed, fair copy, complete four verses of the final version of "America the Beautiful." 1 page, 4to; uneven toning overall, three holes punched in left margin (not affecting text) each reinforced with linen ring on verso, short closed tears in top and right edges. [Wellesley, 1920]

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Additional Details

Bates (1859-1929), an English professor at Wellesley, spent the summer of 1893 lecturing at Colorado College, where a group of visiting faculty took a prairie wagon ride to Pike's Peak. Moved by the breathtaking Rocky Mountain scenery, Bates scribbled the stanzas in her notebook on the trip back. Two years later, they were first published in the Congregationalist and almost immediately set to music. Bates rewrote the poem in 1904 and again in 1913.
This fair copy--the third version of the poem, indicated by the first line of the third stanza--is the version we know and use today.
with--Autograph Letter Signed, to "My dear Mr. Winslow," sending an autograph copy of "America the Beautiful," expressing happiness that the poem was chosen as his "Camp Song," and closing with a slightly adapted quotation from the third verse of her poem: "May all success be nobleness / And every gain divine!" 1 page, 8vo, "Wellesley College" stationery. Wellesley, 29 December 1920.