[Autographs & Manuscripts] Kent, Rockwell
Typed Letter, signed
Au Sable Forks, New York, September 21, 1937. 1 1/2 pp. 4to. On Kent's Au Sable Forks letterhead, with typed addressed postal envelope. To Mr. G.W. Cobb, Jr. of the American Can Company Advertising Department, expounding on the place of literature in a revolutionary age: "..It is high time I thanked you formally for The Prophet, and now having read it, for Moscow Skies. We found it an exceptionally stirring novel, with all the epic scope of Tolstoy... Its picture of Russia is in no way inconsistent with what I thought of life in the Soviets... The Prophet has moved me by its truth, wisdom, and extraordinary poetic beauty,... It is more beautiful than the Sermon on the Mount. But because it comes to me now in 1937 instead of to me in 1900, and comes to the world in the twentieth century instead to the world in the first century, it will neither be remembered by me or the world....There are few books, maybe none, that are for all time...There have been periods when people could properly concern themselves with the problems of their own souls and the cultivation of their own spiritual gardens. Today is no such time. We are living in a time of revolution, and Revolutions makes us extroverts. Someday, to people like me, Gibran's Prophet may have great significance. At the moment it has none..." Creases along old folds, paper clip residue in blank left edges of first sheet, contents starting to fade.