TARKINGTON BOOTH Autograph Letter Signed to My dear Mr Kenne

Sale 2461 - Lot 272

Price Realized: $ 875

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

Estimate: $ 350 - $ 500

"THERE WAS NO 'EYE ON SALES'--I NEVER HAVE THAT EYE" TARKINGTON, BOOTH. Autograph Letter Signed, to "My dear Mr. Kennedy," explaining why he wrote Alice Adams [1921]. 1 3/4 pages, 8vo, personal stationery; staple holes along left margin, folds. Kennebunkport, 12 November 1921

Set Alert for Similar Items

Additional Details

". . . [T]hank you for your letter about 'Alise Adams.' No; there was no 'eye on sales'--I never have that eye during a writing. . . . I told my wife often that nobody would read it--'Why, nobody could stand these people!' Yet I kept on digging into their insides and turning these insides out.
"'Why did he write it?' That's what I kept asking myself. I suppose . . . he wrote it at a very strong prompting--. . . a prompting to 'make' people actual--to put into a book people who had life and reality in them so that they should seem to make print alive. . . . In the course of many years of writing . . . one builds up a kind of inscrutable workman as one of one's selves, and . . . [he] has his own secrets: it takes me quite a time to get at 'em sometimes!"