Letter from Kertesz to Grace Paley, June 9 1981

Dated June 9th, 1981, a typewritten letter from Louise Kertesz to Grace Paley. While there is no name after the valediction "sincerely" at the end of the letter, it can be assumed that this letter is from Louise Kertesz to Grace Paley. In the letter, Louise states that she won’t be cashing in the check that Grace sent for her book because she got some extra copies of the book from the press. Louise wrote to Grace because she is upset that the first review of her book, published in American Literature, “doesn’t acknowledge the importance of material in the book and so doesn’t adequately call readers’ attention to a very important fact in Muriel’s life: for years her work and often her person were disparaged and even vilified in print." In one of the last letters Muriel Rukeyser had sent Louise, she had enclosed two negative, even vicious reviews, one from Hudson Review, the other from Buffalo Courier-Express, and asked if Louise would answer those reviews. At the time, Louise reassured her that her book would be the answer. Louise then goes on to say that it is not true, as the American Literature reviewer states, “that now people recognize how stupid and ugly was a great deal of the response to Muriel’s work, it’s not true that that response was largely ignored by those who knew better.” Louise believes that “it was important to document and to try to analyze and respond to that stupidity (especially on the part of influential people like Randall Jarrell, R.P. Blackmur, M.L. Rosenthal, Louise Bogan, Joseph Warren Beach, etc.) because it persists and because it shows how steadfast Muriel was.”