Selected Letters of Charles Reznikoff: 1917-1976

Author: Charles Reznikoff Editor: Milton Hindus Publisher: Black Sparrow Press (1997)   This landmark volume of correspondence by the great Objectivist poet Charles Reznikoff (1894-1976) sheds light not only on the difficulties of a dedicated artist trying to keep afloat in a materialistic society, but on the relation of poetry to a wider culture during an eventful and turbulent period of modern history. Most of the letters here date from the 1920s and 1930s, when the young Reznikoff, an NYU law school graduate employed sporadically as an editor of legal encyclopedias and as a traveling salesman for his parents' millinery business, devotes his heart and soul to his writing—turning out poems, plays, short stories and novels which, for want of commercial takers, he himself publishes in small editions. Letters to magazine editors such as Henry Hurwitz of The Menorah Journal (the main forum for Reznikoff's early poetry and prose) and Harriet Monroe of Poetry (a 1931 issue, guest-edited by