Item #309377 Autograph letter signed "John Livingston Lowes" to "Mr. Halpern" (Seymour Halpern) in response to Halpern's inquiry regarding the key to success in life. Literary Critic, John Livingston Lowes.

’Never to be Content’

Autograph letter signed "John Livingston Lowes" to "Mr. Halpern" (Seymour Halpern) in response to Halpern's inquiry regarding the key to success in life.

Cambridge [MA]: 13 April 1913 (i.E. 1931).

Price: $65.00


About the item

1 p. on addressed letterhead. 8vo. ’Never to be Content’. Old folds, else fine.

Item #309377

An well-considered response from the learned American scholar and critic of English literature. reading in part: “The only way I know to accomplish anything worth doing is never to be content, at whatever cost of labour, until every detail is as good as on can make it - until, in a word, one’s own artistic or scientific conscience is satisfied - so far as that is ever possible.”

John Livingston Lowes' (1867 - 1945) work specialized in the writings of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Geoffrey Chaucer. His most famous work is The Road to Xanadu: A Study in the Ways of the Imagination (1927), which examines the sources of Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Kubla Khan.

As a high school student, Seymour Halpern (1913-1997), wrote letters to many notables of the day including politicians, military officers, entertainers, diplomats, artists, activists, writers, and businessmen, inquiring about their ideas to the keys to success in life. Halpern would later go on to serve as Republican from New York to the 86th, 87th, 88th, 89th, 90th, 91st and 92nd United States Congresses, holding office from January 3, 1959, to January 3, 1973.