Selected Letters of Langston Hughes by Langston Hughes

Author:Langston Hughes [Hughes, Langston]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: New
ISBN: 9780385353564
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2015-02-10T08:00:00+00:00

TO BLANCHE KNOPF [TLS]

[On Hollow Hills Farm (Carmel Valley), Jamesburg Route, Monterey, California stationery]

September 4, 1939

Mrs. Alfred A. Knopf,

501 Madison Avenue,

New York, New York.

Dear Blanche,

I have settled down in a charming little Mexican house on the side of a hill above the pear orchard here on this beautiful farm in the Carmel Valley—to finish my book. The house is entirely my own for work, and as remote and quiet a place as one would want to find, so I shall not be interrupted. I am sorry the manuscript is not ready to send you now, as I had hoped it would be, but it is going along splendidly and is two-thirds finished, so a month more of steady work should get it done. However, my difficulty at the moment is this: having turned down all lectures for this fall and put aside everything else in order to get the book done, my sources of income have temporarily ceased—and I find myself with an eviction warning from my New York landlord if I do not come through with the August rent. Which is bad enough, but not quite as bad being unable to employ a typist to assist me in the preparation of a final draft—some five hundred pages—which I shall shortly have ready to have recopied. So, much as I dislike to do it at this stage of the game, I am writing to ask you if it would be possible to now allow me an advance of $200.00 on the book, at the moment tentatively entitled THE BIG SEA and which, barring an act of God, will be ready for you in October.

I hope you had a pleasant trip to the coast. I’m sorry I didn’t get out in time to look you up. I was held up in New York doing some special song material for Marianne Oswald with Vernon Duke and Herbert Kingsley.5

My best regards to Alfred,

Sincerely,

Langston

Langston Hughes

P.S. I shall, of course, be willing to do further revision on book should you have suggestions, or find it too long, after you have read it.…. The above address good until Nov.

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