The letter below is one of my most prized possessions, and I lost it for a long time before it finally cropped up in some box I had stashed away with other paraphernalia. For about twenty years, I had it tacked to the bulletin board above my desk.
Jim Harrison was my first favorite writer after Alexandre Dumas. When I was in high school and college, I read everything I could find by him, including his relatively obscure poetry. In short, I idolized him. I still think that his "Legends of the Fall" is one of the best novellas ever written. (I still refuse to see the movie. Come on, Brad Pitt as Tristan? Come on!)
So I'm very happy to have found the letter he wrote in response to a three- or four-page, crazy, over-zealous, likely-beer-splashed missive I hammered out a year after I graduated from high school, on my old Royal standard that sounded like a Gatling gun--or would have if I'd been a better typist.
Anyway, here it is.
Wow, Pete, that is special. What a fine thing to have found again after having thought it lost.
ReplyDeleteI have a similar letter from poet Donald Hall that I value highly, for various reasons.
It's nice to know these literary giants don't have all the answers--they just seem like they do.
That's really cool, Pete.
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