Oct 28, 2021 - Sale 2584

Sale 2584 - Lot 106

Price Realized: $ 688
?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 600 - $ 900
ON AMERICA: "SUCH A THING COULD NOT HAVE HAPPENED IN ANY OTHER COUNTRY" COOPER, JAMES FENIMORE. Autograph Letter Signed, "Truth," to editor of the New York Commercial Adviser, pointing out that Americans do not respect their writers the way Europeans do theirs, and giving an account of a physician who felt justified in maligning a writer despite confessing to knowing nothing about him because the physician had no opportunity to learn about him. Note written in lower margin recto signed "RB" [likely Cooper's neighbor, Roosevelt Bailey]: "Written by Ja's Fenimore Cooper, 25 Nov: 1844, for the Commercial Adviser. He alluded to himself--the Physician's name he told me, was Harper, and the falsehood, was about the point of Land on Otsego Lake, which caused such a hubub a few years ago." 1 page, 4to; article [from the Commercial Adviser] pasted [likely by Cooper] in upper margin recto, minor loss to upper left corner, faint scattered foxing, folds. Np, [November 1844]
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"I have read your anecdotes of the respect paid to literary men in Europe, with pleasure; but the picture would have been more complete had you said something of the manner in which literary men are treated among ourselves. I question if there can be found a writer in this country, from the highest to the lowest, who would not say that he has found his public reputation a disadvantage to him. . . .
"A country physician was . . . raising an outcry against a writer, on grounds that the physician was then willing to admit were unjust. 'I do not like the man, and prejudice led me . . .' he added. 'But you do not know the man, as you have just confessed, and why should you dislike him?' 'He is an author, and as such a public man, and all public men should keep open house in this country. Had this man kept an open house I might have known him, and then I might have thought differently of him.'
"Now, . . . half the journals of this county joined in an outcry against an American author, on the authority of a man who promulgated falsehood, confessedly under the influence of feelings like these! Such a thing could not have happened in any other country on earth."