Annotating Frost • Schelling the Trailblazer

View this email in your browser » Annotating Frost The Letters of Robert Frost, Volume 3: 1929–1936 is the latest in a five-volume collection of the poet's correspondence. Gathering hundreds of Frost's letters, most of them previously uncollected, Volume 3 follows Frost through a seven-year period in which he achieved new literary heights while also navigating great personal upheaval. In honor of Poetry Month, HUP Editor Emily Silk asked Mark Richardson, Volume 3 coeditor (with Donald Sheehy, Robert Bernard Hass, and Henry Atmore) to share a behind-the-scenes look at editing and annotating Frost's correspondence. Tell us a bit about what readers can expect to see in Frost's letters from this period. To whom is he writing? Any new or surprising correspondents, especially for readers familiar with the previous volumes? This volume differs most from volumes one and two in the number of letters it contains from Frost to members of his family—to his son Carol, his daughters Marjorie and Lesley, his grandson Prescott, and his son-in-law Willard Fraser. In 1931, diagnoses of tuberculosis led Marjorie to move to Boulder, Colorado, for treatment (where she met and got engaged to Willard); and led Carol to take his wife Lillian (who'd also fallen ill), and their young son Prescott, to Monrovia, California (where the Pottenger Sanatorium was located). This family diaspora occasioned numerous letters. Readers will also find a rich series of letters to Frost's friend and protégé J.J. Lankes, a woodcut artist who "decorated," as Frost put it, a number of his books. A few things more. Reading this volume again in proof, we were struck by how much Frost has to say about marriage; about the nature and trials of the literary vocation (often in letters to younger, aspiring writers); and about book design and fine printing (he worked with some of the best printers in America). What does the work of editing and annotating Frost's letters involve? Did you make any unexpected discoveries as you annotated the letters in Volume 3? I've been reading Frost's mail for twenty years. Making the letters fully "available" to readers involves considerable annotation. What we learn while annotating often surprises me… Read more » Schelling the Trailblazer Books influence us in untold ways, and the ones that influence us the most are often read in childhood. Harvard University Press Senior Editor Julia Kirby is reminded of this on the anniversary of the birth of one of this country's most celebrated economists. This month would have brought Thomas Schelling's one-hundredth birthday—and he got closer to seeing it than many mortals. The Nobel laureate economist died just five years ago, after a brilliant career as both a scholar and an advisor to US foreign policy strategists. What better day to dip into his classic work, The Strategy of Conflict, itself now sixty years old but still relevant and a lively read. Schelling's breakthrough contribution was his application of the then-novel framework of game theory to the realm of Cold War decision-making. He saw in the dynamics of geopolitics many situations where adversarial nations were in conflict but at the same time held interests in common—and where a zero-sum mentality would not yield the most effective moves. Today, as Russia's massing of troops on its border with Ukraine has analysts guessing, and Joe Biden prepares for a probable summit with Vladimir Putin, Schelling's Strategy of Conflict remains a useful model for parsing the possibilities. For me, however, there's another book that also comes to mind whenever Schelling's name is mentioned. It's certainly not an HUP book, or anything you would find on a syllabus, but Schelling made a habit of mentioning it. According to his wife, Alice Schelling, whenever he was asked about books that had influenced his own thinking, he responded without pause: Smoky the Cow Horse. It sounds like a joke of an answer—most anyone would have expected him to name a work like Games and Decisions by Howard Raiffa and R. Duncan Luce—but Schelling really meant it. Will James's 1926 book about a colt was just the kind of tear-jerking tale, offered in a tough cowboy twang, that could go straight to the eight-year-old Schelling's heart and get him thinking. I've always recalled this fact not because it is whimsical but because it strikes me as truer than any other response I have heard to the question, "What book influenced you most?" Purely on logical grounds, the books one encounters earliest have the greatest potential for impact in the long term. Path dependency being what it is, early choices open up channels for further exploration in certain directions, while pushing alternative paths to the shadows. Way leads on to way, and one's thinking and character are formed on the journey that follows. Alice Schelling said her husband recalled reading Smoky as "the first time he understood empathy for other human beings"… Read more » STAY CONNECTED MORE RESOURCES    Subscribe    Facebook    Twitter    Instagram Awards » Catalogs » Events » Resources for Educators and Students » © 2021 Harvard University Press. All rights reserved. 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