.jpg?w=1)
PROPERTY FROM THE FORBES COLLECTION
ROOSEVELT, Theodore. Typed letter signed ("Theodore Roosevelt"), as President, to "the writer of 'Point of View' at Scribner's Magazine, On board U.S.S. Mississippi, 1 October 1907. 1 page, 4to, White House stationery, with three lines in holograph at end, and a few emendations; with original White House envelope.
細節
ROOSEVELT, Theodore. Typed letter signed ("Theodore Roosevelt"), as President, to "the writer of 'Point of View' at Scribner's Magazine, On board U.S.S. Mississippi, 1 October 1907. 1 page, 4to, White House stationery, with three lines in holograph at end, and a few emendations; with original White House envelope.
"I AM NOT MUCH OF AN ADMIRER OF AUTOMOBILES"
"COOPER WAS A GENIUS" -- THE PRESIDENT AS LITERARY CRITIC in this curious combination of reflections on technology and literature--more precisely, technology in literature. He takes a writer to task for praising a novel that made an automobile the central protagonist of the tale. "I am not much of an admirer of automobiles, regarding them simply as useful for certain purposes of locomotion; but don't you think you are wrong in speaking as if it were something purely modern to make this kind of an instrument the hero of a novel, o laudator temporis acti [praiser of times past]? You say that Irving would never have done with a sail-boat what a modern writer does with an automobile. Irving would not have done it because he could not have. He did not know anything about boats. But Irving's contemporary Cooper did." In one of Cooper's best stories, "The Two Admirals," the 'ships are his real heroes, and he proceeds to tell their fates as such..." Roosevelt adds in pen, at the end of the letter: "He treats his ships just as the modern writer does automobiles; only, Cooper was a genius."
"I AM NOT MUCH OF AN ADMIRER OF AUTOMOBILES"
"COOPER WAS A GENIUS" -- THE PRESIDENT AS LITERARY CRITIC in this curious combination of reflections on technology and literature--more precisely, technology in literature. He takes a writer to task for praising a novel that made an automobile the central protagonist of the tale. "I am not much of an admirer of automobiles, regarding them simply as useful for certain purposes of locomotion; but don't you think you are wrong in speaking as if it were something purely modern to make this kind of an instrument the hero of a novel, o laudator temporis acti [praiser of times past]? You say that Irving would never have done with a sail-boat what a modern writer does with an automobile. Irving would not have done it because he could not have. He did not know anything about boats. But Irving's contemporary Cooper did." In one of Cooper's best stories, "The Two Admirals," the 'ships are his real heroes, and he proceeds to tell their fates as such..." Roosevelt adds in pen, at the end of the letter: "He treats his ships just as the modern writer does automobiles; only, Cooper was a genius."