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in pencil in top margin Austin
"Yaddo" 19 June 1963
Dear Jack, -
Yesterday I finished underlined: The Disinherited, read in a day & a half. What a painful, powerful book. It made a deep impression on me, one which I shall never forget. I can't bring myself to write a "literary" criticism of it; yet it underlined: is literature: it stays together, holds together, ends at just the right place, as he narrator walks off - or drives off in his flivver - from Monkey Creek and its specificities - into the crusade to make the revolution revolve, the Kingdom come. Wonderfully effective are the stanzas of poetry - or snatches of poetry, as they sometimes are (the two lines from Vachel Lindsay): the underlined: work songs, the Irish ditto, even the stanza from Arthur Ficke. - Where do we go from here?
With deep gratitude, Yours, Austin Where is Darkest Midlothian? Is [sic] is a suburb of Chicago? I gave a lecture at Iowa City a few months ago & stopped for a day at Chicago, which (like Iowa City) I hadn't seen for ten years. Chicago has grown strikingly beautiful: in left margin That is of course the part that a traveller sees: the lake-front & that strange coil-shaped scraper of the sky.