An autograph letter signed “Grace Zaring Stone” and a dictated manuscript letter signed “Grace Zaring Stone”.
Stonington, Conn: 13 August, n.y.[probably 1959] and 6 April 1981.
Price: $50.00
About the item
1 1/2 pages each. 1 vols. 4to. To Wesley Hartley, an educator and teacher. Folds, else fine.
Item #29054
Responding to Hartley's letter enquiring about her literary career and the importance of her education on her writing. She writes “my experience has been fairly un-orthodox. Due to rather peculiar circumstances my formal education was stopped when I was fourteen years old. During that I time I studied music only absolrbed what ever else I could by a prodigious amount of reading and travel and by contacts.” In the second letter, dictated due to poor eyesight, she expands on the above and then discusses her reasons for taking the pseudonym “Ethel Vance.” At the time of the publication of “Escape” and just before America entered the Second World War, she and 9 others had been supoenaed by the Congressional Committee of Un-American Activities. As her daughter was married into an eminent Hungarian family and Hungary at that time was “practically a German Nazi Province” and not wanting any bad publicity to come out of the Congressional investigation to affect her daughter or her family she took the pseudonym.
