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June 4, 1951.

Dear Jack -

 Many thanks for your delightful anthology, Midland Humor, and especially for the charming inscription. The criminal master-minds who share my lot were quite awed by it, and it has given me quite a cachet in the mayhem - and - mopery set. They seem to think that an author belongs somewhere in the social scale between a preacher and a moonshiner, which in Dixie is not as large a gap as you might suppose.
 I've been skipping around in your book, and so far have particularly enjoyed Wilcox's With Everything So Scarce, McKinney's No Tears, No Good.
and Balch's Momma Gest and the Irisher. The Peter De Vries story was well-done too, I thought, and your "Sissy" was entertaining.
 Algren's story has an incisive bite, as does all his stuff - The Shulman was very familiar to me from several readings of his book.
 Incidentally, what did Shulman ever have to say, if anything, about the contemptuous, and, to me, 
                                   (over)