Memoirs and Letters

Memoirs and Letters was first published in 1934. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

This volume, the last in a set of four containing posthumous works of Oscar W. Firkins, consists mainly of some two hundred personal letters, which reveal many delightful facets of a unique character.

Oscar W. Firkins—critic, biographer, playwright, lecturer, and teacher—was regarded as a recluse, living in a world peopled largely by "poets dead and gone" and the creatures of their imagination and his own. That he enjoyed warm friendships with men and women of his time is brought to light in these miscellaneous letters: letters to clergymen and children, to editors and club women, to students and poets, to actors and college deans.

Many brilliantly epigrammatic comments from Firkins' famous classroom lectures are included in the section of this book entitled "From Oscar Firkins' Notebooks." The "Estimate and Appreciation" with which the volume opens is by Dr. Richard Burton, for many years a colleague of Professor Firkins at the University of Minnesota. "Oscar Firkins as a Teacher" is contributed by a former student. A complete bibliography, compiled by Ina Ten Eyck Firkins, concludes the volume.