JEFFERS, Robinson.
Holograph Note to M.B. Carver, Jr. — with Lee Jeffers Letter, Tor House Envelope, and Companion Correspondence.
ARCHIVE OF FIVE ITEMS, SIGNED AND DATED MARCH 2, 1961. Carmel, California: Tor House, 1961.
Autograph note in Jeffers's hand on a slip of paper approximately 2.5 × 5 inches, signed and dated March 2, 1961, quoting two lines from Section XII of his 1927 narrative poem The Women at Point Sur: "my favorite — / I have seen and not fallen, / I am stronger than the idols — Women at Point Sur." Together with four related items forming a closed-provenance archive: (1) the original request letter sent to Jeffers by John Bennett of Bloomington, Illinois, bearing on its verso a handwritten response from Lee Jeffers — Robinson's daughter-in-law, wife of Donnan Jeffers — explaining that her father-in-law was very ill and that even a signature had become difficult for him; (2) the return envelope from Tor House, postmarked Carmel, addressed to John Bennett at 1301 N. Park St., Bloomington, Illinois; (3) John Bennett's transmittal letter to M.B. Carver, Jr. forwarding the Jeffers material; (4) the postmarked envelope of that transmittal, sent from Bloomington on March 7, 1961 to M.B. Carver, Jr., 225 W. Vine Street, Canton, Illinois. Accompanied by a 2023 letter of provenance from M.B. Carver, Jr. himself, the original 1961 recipient, recalling his receipt of the packet as a young admirer of Jeffers's poetry. Fine condition throughout.
A late, intimate manuscript artifact, written less than eleven months before Jeffers's death at Tor House on January 20, 1962. The lines he chose are spoken in The Women at Point Sur by the preacher-in-revolt at the poem's center — the work Jeffers considered his most ambitious narrative, and the one his first readers received with hostility. That he returned to it more than three decades later, naming these lines his "favorite" in a hand grown unsteady, reads as a writer's late and private reckoning with his own ambition.
The unbroken chain of documentation — the holograph slip, the daughter-in-law's verso response, the Tor House return envelope, the transmittal letter and its postmarked cover, and the recipient's 2023 confirmation — makes this an unusually well-attested small archive. Jeffers manuscript material of any kind is scarce; a holograph note carrying a quoted self-citation, full transmittal context, and an identified recipient is scarcer still.
SKU TO-2026-034
