AUTOGRAPH LETTER SIGNED (ALS) with AUTOGRAPH MANUSCRIPT (AM) by a 17-Year-Old Future Pulitzer Winner

Cambridge, [10 July 1943]. Letter. Creases from mailing. About Fine. Superb, very early three-page handwritten letter on two 5-1/2" x 6-3/4" sheets of personal stationery to a former teacher and mentor SIGNED "Alison." Lurie, just 17 at the time, had just begun her freshman year at Radcliffe College: "I've tried not to write until I got more used to everything, until all the pieces of the puzzle fell into place -- but they don't. I won't admit it, even to myself, but I don't like Radcliffe." She finds that her fellow students "talk for hours about nothing at all," and her English composition teacher is "a horrid slap-you-on-the-back conservative practical sort of man who goes in for punctuation and research." She discusses dating Harvard men: "they're all exactly the same, every one." With a HOLOGRAPH MANUSCRIPT of a 12-line poem titled "Spider's Web" (likely never published) which Lurie sent with the explanation: "You'll be the first person to see it -- there's no one here I can show it to. I feel so alone." Some 380 words in all. With the envelope hand-addressed by Lurie. Despite her early misgivings, Lurie went on to graduate from Radcliffe. Her first novel was not published until almost two decades after this letter. She won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for her 1984 novel FOREIGN AFFAIRS.