Typed letter signed “Miriam Allen de Ford”.
San Francisco: 22 March 1960.
Price: $75.00
About the item
1 page. 1 vols. 4to. To Wesley Hartley, an educator and teacher. Folds, small stain, else fine.
Item #29087
Hartley had written to DeFord concerning the importance of secondary education upon creative writing. She writes “One is either or is not born a writer, and short of technical training there is little a school or college can do, unless to encourage one (by publication in school magazines, and so on). Certainly I have never sold a piece of writing because I had a college degree. I have never taken a journalistm course or one in creative writing…If the student is thinking of writing, not as an easy way to earn a living (it isn't!) but as amode of expression of his thoughts and emotions and of whatever talent is in him, then of course the longer he lives with the thoughts and emotions of great men and women, which they but into their books, the more purposively he will be guided to full expression oe his own. In other words, neither high school nor collegecan be an engineering school to turn out professional writers; but the born writer cannot have too much sharpening of his wits against the wits of others, alive or dead”.
