Over 150 first editions, association copies, letters, and more, from an important collection. Including books by both Leonard and Virginia Woolf, their family, and friends. Featuring a lovely copy of their handprinted edition of TS Eliot’s The Wasteland, and the black tulip of the handprinted books of Virginia and Leonard Woolf’s Hogarth Press: the memorial volume Poems by Leonard’s brother Sidney, recently killed in the war. 

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For further information, email Sarah@GlennHorowitz.com

On November 22, 1963, following Kennedy’s assassination, John Steinbeck wrote to Lyndon B. Johnson offering “profound respect and loyalty to you in the hard days ahead.” Steinbeck also indicated that he and his wife were in Poland, touring behind the Iron Curtain at Kennedy’s request, “talking with writers and with students.” He continued, “Being non-diplomatic, we have been able to observe many things not ordinarily available. And if these experiences can be of value to you, they are freely offered.” Johnson later replied, “Your letter was comforting to me. I am hopeful that very soon I may sit with you and talk about our country.” The following year, Johnson would award Steinbeck the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civil honor awarded for service in peace time.

Steinbeck's support of Johnson took the form, at times, of speech writing. In this letter to Presidential Special Consultant Eric Goldman he forwards a draft of a speech for the January 1965 inaugural, noting that it would like go unused -- which it largely did. 

Over the course of three pages, Steinbeck repeats the concept of the “Great Society” which Johnson had initiated during his campaign the previous year, but in most other ways he departs from Johnson's oratorical style.  He begins, 

Some there are who think our country is an inheritance, a gift proffered like a sandwich on a clean doily on a silver tray. This is not so. In our beginning we crept, scuttled, escaped, brave and frightened from the safe and settled corners of the earth to a strange and hostile wilderness. Restless energy beyond loneliness and longing drove us to a nameless, inhospitable continent…

He writes this about “the Great Society”:  “The Great Society, as I see it, is not the fixed and sterile polity of the bees nor the ordered and changeless battalions of the ants. It is the miracle of becoming – always becoming, trying, probing, failing, resting and trying again but always gaining a little – perfectable but not perfect.”

Johnson retained the imagery from this passage, with some adjustments: “I do not believe that the Great Society is the ordered, changeless, and sterile battalion of the ants. It is the excitement of becoming – always becoming, trying, probing, falling, resting, and trying again – but always trying and always gaining.”

Though Johnson would build on many of the themes Steinbeck proposed in this draft (notably the wilderness, expansion, and class), he omitted or greatly altered the rhetorical questions, dramatic hyperbole, analogies to running mustangs, and references to a nation’s leader as the “top banana."  

Admittedly, it had been a rush job. Steinbeck told Goldman, "This is the best I can do in the time given me ... It is somewhat over the first time of 3 minutes but I will bet it is shorter than any of the prayers. And now I join the ranks of the loyal, ever the loving Opposition...."

Tennessee Williams, pictured with long-term partner Frank Merlo in the Bamboo Room – “air-conditioned”! – a Key West cocktail bar Williams frequented and made references to in his Letters. 

Williams annotated the photo on the base of its paper folder, having a drinky-pie at The Bamboo Room in Key West.

Williams met Frank Merlo – an occasional actor who had served in the U.S. Navy in World War II – in New York in the fall of 1948. Merlo, Williams's partner for nearly 15 years, was also his travel companion, acting as an unofficial secretary on Williams's business trips abroad – and on vacations to Key West, where the pair would eventually settle.

This photograph is part of a larger Tennessee Williams collection containing unpublished annotated Streetcar Named Desire manuscript materials, typescripts, and related correspondence and photographs. For more information please email: sarah@glennhorowitz.com.

Three books inscribed by Evelyn Waugh to Graham Greene, documenting one of the compelling relationships in 20th-century English literature. 

Their initial relationship was cordial at best. The two overlapped at Oxford in 1922, but did not meet until 1937 when Greene, the editor of the upscale literary publication Night and Day, hired the perpetually impecunious Waugh to produce a weekly book page. Waugh kvetched – “the pay is rather disappointing but I am getting spliced & want as many regular jobs as I can get” – and asked that at the very least the books he was to review be sent directly to his home to enhance his library.

As their friendship developed, Waugh would return the favor but sending Greene inscribed first editions of his own works, such as these three volumes: The Loved One (1948), Black Mischief (1932), and Helena (1950). When the magazine went under, Greene asked his writers to excuse his commissions; Waugh would have none of it: “I received your telegram this morning after the enclosed article had been written. As it had been definitely commissioned... I am afraid I must hold you to your offer, whether you print it or not.”

Despite this rocky start, the two became close. Waugh reviewed Greene’s The Heart of the Matter: “...of Mr. Graham Greene alone among contemporary writers one can say without affectations that his breaking silence with a new serious novel is a literary “event”... [He] is a story-teller of genius.” Greene, pleased, sent a note of thanks: “You’ve made me very conceited – thank you very much. There’s no other living writer whom I would rather receive praise (or criticism) from.” And the two did exchange a fair amount of criticism over the years, frequently sourcing from politics and religion. Waugh was a staunch aristocrat, and Greene, a loyal socialist. Both were converts to Catholicism, but Greene did not believe in Hell and, given the number of affairs he had while married with married women, clearly did not consider the institution of marriage a sacred one. 

This copy of The Loved One, Waugh’s send-up of Los Angelean culture inspired by a brief stay in the summer of 1947, during which he worked in Hollywood on the film adaptation of Brideshead Revisited for MGM. The book is one of 250 numbered copies signed by both Waugh and the illustrator, Stuart Boyle. The story, set in Forest Lawn Cemetery – a west coast spot to which Waugh was compulsively drawn – grew from a series of articles on “California burial customs” he wrote after his return to London. It satirically follows a young English poet who moves to Los Angeles to find success in Hollywood only to get mixed up in a love triangle with funeral cosmetician Aimee Thanatogenos and the sinister embalmer "Mr. Joyboy." Waugh inscribed this copy: Mr. Graham Greene’s copy.

Waugh inscribed Helena – the novel he considered his greatest literary achievement: For Graham love Evelyn Oct. 1st 1950. His readers regarded it as an career embarrassment. Waugh intended to write a new sort of biography of a saint, while narrating the story of Christianity’s origins. Unschooled in Jewish history broadly or in the life of Helena specifically, he was undaunted. He framed the narrative around the story of a girl, and branded it a reverentially religious text, though it’s clearly punctuated with a 20th-century sexual awareness. Reviewers recoiled, then attacked, with one comparing Waugh unfavorably with Greene: “Waugh has done nothing in this book that he has not done as well or better elsewhere... While Graham Greene’s characters make the frontal approach to Catholicism – undergoing the betrayal on the pier or the Pascalian agony in the shrubbery – Waugh’s converts generally get to Heaven the back way through having the right kind of nanny” (John Raymond in the New Statesman). All things considered, it would be difficult to overstate the poignancy of Waugh’s loving inscription to Greene in this copy. 

Clearly Greene, an avid, life-long book-hunter, acquired his copy of Black Mischief second-hand – it bears the Book Society bookplate of one E.E. Cretchley, who also signed the book – and then solicited the inscription from Waugh, who obliged, Not for Crutchley [sic] / but for Graham / from / Evelyn. Black Mischief, falling between Decline and Fall, Vile Bodies, and the masterful A Handful of Dust, is often given short shrift in critical dialogues. In it,  Waugh fictionalized his voyage to Abyssinia as recounted in Remote People (1931). It is his first novel set outside of London and Oxford, and the creation of the Kingdom of Azania and Emperor Seth forced Waugh to rely heavily on his powers of invention. Titled Accession in manuscript, it was changed at the request of Waugh’s American publisher John Farrar who pointed out that “accession as such means practically nothing in America.” Waugh, resigned, resplied, “Tell these troublesome yanks that the novel will be called Black Mischief and will be ready for them in about 3 weeks. It is extremely good.”

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The manuscript of “Christmas Vacation,” a 27-page handwritten story by Capote when he was about ten years old. 

Divided into five chapters (“Christmas Guest”; “The Uninvited Guests”; “Uncle William Makes Trouble”; “The Kids Make Trouble”; “The Hoodlums Leave”) “Christmas Vacation” features a raucous, lively cast of characters, and has been called “by far the most significant and substantial of [Capote’s] childhood literary efforts” (Morrow 139). 

The story features Mrs. Busybody, a “fat old widow” and “public nuisance,” and her foils, a group of unruly neighborhood children, and the family of seven who arrive uninvited to stay with her for the Christmas holiday. Amidst a slapstick array of flying china, whiskey drinking, and fist fights, the disastrous visit of Uncle William, Lulu Belle, and their children unfolds as old Mrs. Busybody comically perseveres. 

There are few surviving examples of Capote’s earliest forays into writing, and biographer Gerald Clarke notes that “those few – sixteen themes, stories, and poems – were saved by one of his English teachers at Trinity, John E. Langford” (Capote: A Biography, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1988; p. 50). This manuscript was reproduced in full with a transcription and introductory essay by Bradford Morrow in Conjunctions: 31 Radical Shadows (Annandale-on-Hudson: Bard College, Fall 1998; pp. 139-77).  

***

Following his parents’ divorce, six-year old Truman Streckfus Persons (his surname changed to Capote following his adoption by his mother’s second husband in February 1935) was sent to live with his mother’s relatives, the Faulks, in Monroeville, Alabama. “Christmas Vacation,” originally titled “Mrs. Busybody,” began as Capote’s winning submission for a children’s writing contest in the Mobile Register when he was ten years old. A roman á clef of sorts, the story achieved a degree of notoriety upon its publication in the local paper. 

Monroeville – the Faulk household and its neighbors on South Alabama Avenue in particular – appear to have provided Capote with a wealth of creative material, and “Christmas Vacation” lampoons the adults in his life, including next-door neighbor Frances Lee – mother to Nelle Harper Lee, only a year younger than Capote. According to Lee biographer Charles Shields, Capote disliked Mrs. Lee to such an extent – he thought she was gossipy and eccentric – that he “pilloried her when he was ten years old” with the creation of Mrs. Busybody and that the portrayal was “so true to life” that the young writer became the talk of the town (Mockingbird: A Portrait of Harper Lee, New York: Henry Holt, 2006; p. 40). Capote later reflected on the local reception of the publication: “I’d walk down the street and people on their front porches would pause, fanning for a moment. I found they were very upset about it. I was a little hesitant about showing anything after that. I remember I said, ‘Oh, I don’t know why I did that, I’ve given up on writing.’ But I was writing more fiercely than ever” (Lawrence Grobel, Conversations with Capote, New York: Da Capo Press, 2000; pp. 53-54). Capote later moved from Monroeville to New York and handed in the story, re-titled “Christmas Vacation,” for a school assignment while he was a sixth-grader at Trinity School in Manhattan.