Across the Spectrum:The Interdisciplinary Life and Letters of John G. Neihardt (‘Flaming Rainbow’)

Many thanks for a good letter and the batch of MS.!

As for your letter — Indeed I do not mind that you like me best when I was near breaking after leaving the P. D. That was, for some time, really the end of everything I'd worked for! I saw it so in my heart and took it quietly and with a feeling almost like relief. I did not break, altho I went out into a world that did not know me an and saw only a little, wrinkled old man hunting a job. Secretly, I got a wry wry satisfaction out of the goddamned predicament. In Chicago, while pounding the street street,, I often chuckled — the way a man might laugh at machine guns, since he was already dead anyway. (But in the deep places inside me Something knew, by God! Something really knew!)

You speak of cutting out some of your analysis. Don't, unless there is some very special reason. Your analysis is always corking good and illuminating. It has been so throughout your dissertation and the biography up to now.

I've read (with great difficulty) much of your MS, and I found a few minor errors — never in the analysis, always in factual details, and then not very much. I'll have the MS read to me, and I'll dictate any needed corrections or suggestions for occasional additions.

Wayne State College wants me for the summer, and wants to pay me top salary and furnish board & room, also a secretary. I'd give only the Twilight of the Sioux and have time for conferences with students. I may go. It would round out a very good story for afterwhile!

I don't like you, as usual, because you hate my poetry and that do makes me mad, don't it?