The collection includes two letters from Constance Cary Harrison, a Southern belle whose father was editor of a Maryland newspaper. After the Civil War, she moved to New York and wrote articles for Scribner’s, Harper’s, and The Century. Among her many books — mostly historical and romance novels — is a memoir, in which she mentions her friendship with the young Jewish poet Emma Lazarus. The author takes the credit for persuading Miss Lazarus to donate a poem to a portfolio Mrs. Harrison was assembling to raise funds for the construction of a pedestal for the Statue of Liberty:
Miss Lazarus was calling upon me when I begged her to write something for my “Portfolio.” She declared she could think of nothing suitable, was mutinous and inclined to be sarcastic, when I reminded her of her visits to the Russian and other refugees at Ward’s Island, the newly arrived immigrants whose sad lot had so often excited her sympathy. At once her brow cleared, her eye lightened. She became gentle and tender in a moment, and, going away, soon after sent me “The New Colossus”.
The famed lines from that poem made their way to the inscription at Lady Liberty’s base.
The letters Mary saved are mostly businesslike, without juicy anecdotes, but I revel in the courtly beauty of the Victorian prose. For instance, Kate Douglas Wiggin’s endorsement begins:
Whether a literary woman can live with The Bookman or not is a matter of opinion. I can not, but it is true I do not try.
Who, nowadays, would call herself a “literary woman”?
The pedestrian middle section is marked, in pencil, for quotation in the brochure of endorsements, but the ending is the most charming part, referring to the bestseller list:
[N]o author who has seen his name third or fourth on the list in Portland Oregon or Peoria Illinois but would read it for the rest of his life in the hope of feeling again that irrational exaltation.
Paul Leicester Ford, biographer of Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, and Ulysses S. Grant, returned the typewritten request for a blurb (“…we hope you will not think we are asking too great a favor…”) with a note scribbled at the bottom:
Dear Mr. Crowninshield:
If I ever did, I would in this case. But I am not celebrity enough to go into the testimonial line, even for so good a thing as the B. Moreover, it doesn’t need it. P.L.F.
Ford was the great-grandson of Noah Webster of dictionary fame. Sickly in his childhood, Ford received his education from his sister and from his father’s library of over 100,000 books and 60,000 manuscripts.
At the age of 11, the boy was given a small printing press. His first project was to edit and print a manuscript of family genealogy compiled by Webster himself. Next he published a book of poetry by his mother.
He joined a printing club, a fad among educated Americans of the late 1900s, putting out scholarly works from among his father’s manuscript collection, such as An Account of a Plan for Civilizing the North American Indians, Proposed in the Eighteenth Century by John Daniel Hammerer.
Ford’s first work of fiction was a political novel that became wildly popular when the corruption-fighting hero was rumored to be based on President Grover Cleveland. The book was roundly panned by Henry James as having no artistic merit whatsoever. Ford’s historical novel Janice Meredith: A Story of the American Revolution was serialized in The Bookman in 1898. Dodd, Mead published the book, which became a runaway bestseller, with then-record sales of 200,000 copies in the first three months.
In 1902, Ford was murdered by his brother, an athlete and magazine writer, who then committed suicide.
Violet Snow, you’re one heck of a writer.