BATES KATHARINE LEE Autograph Transcript Signed of America t

Sale 1930 - Lot 17

Price Realized: $ 46,000

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

Estimate: $ 40,000 - $ 50,000

BATES, KATHARINE LEE. Autograph Transcript Signed of America the Beautiful, complete four verses of the final edition of the poem. 1 page, single 4to sheet; a bit toned, mounted to a stiff sheet. [Wellesley, 1914-25]

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Bates, an English professor at Wellesley, spent the summer of 1893 lecturing at Colorado College, where a group of visiting faculty (including her lover Katharine Coman) 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 to simplify the prose. This fair copy is the third edition of the poem (indicated by the first line of the third stanza), which is the version we know and use today. It is an extremely scarce autograph item, with only one other fair copy coming to auction in the last 20 years. The National Union Catalogue of Manuscript Collections only locates a similar 2-page copy at the J. S. Copley Library in La Jolla, CA, and a signed autograph copy of just the first stanza of the poem at Dartmouth.<