A Roosevelt Reading List.(The Talk of the Town)(Edith Kermit Roosevelt's letters)

About a year and a half ago, Harriet Shapiro, who is the head of exhibitions at the New York Society Library, was, in the manner of modern-day researchers everywhere, randomly Googling--looking for information about Marion King, the institution's longtime librarian, who died in 1976. To Shapiro's surprise, a link came up to Harvard's Theodore Roosevelt collection, in which lay a cache of nearly six hundred letters written to King by Edith Kermit Roosevelt. "Mrs. Roosevelt destroyed a lot of her correspondence--she was a lady of another era," Shapiro said the other day, as she put the finishing touches on an exhibition about the letters which was about to open at the library. "So to find the entire correspondence is wonderful."

The letters spanned the period of Mrs. Roosevelt's widowhood, beginning in 1920, the year after Theodore Roosevelt died. In them, she requested books to be sent to her home, Sagamore Hill, near Oyster Bay. (Among the first works she asked for were volumes by Agatha Christie, Lytton Strachey, and a book about the botany of China, "On the Eaves of the World," by one Reginald Farrer.) The letters end in February, 1947, twenty months before Mrs. Roosevelt's death: "Don't forget to send me the Thackeray letters when they come home to roost" was her last literary request. The exhibit includes copies of some of the letters--the originals are still at Harvard--along with the original cards listing her borrowings, and a selection of the books that once did duty on her night table.

The letters show that Mrs. Roosevelt was an avid reader--she got through about four volumes a week--and had strong, if not always unerring, tastes. She dismissed much contemporary fiction, including John Steinbeck's "The Grapes of Wrath": "You know I can't read those long modern novels," she wrote to Mrs. King. She thought Walt Whitman "a second-rate poseur, tho' we forgive him much for 'My Captain' or 'Lilacs.' " Mark Twain was, in her view, "a vulgarian," and Thomas Mann "a great sham." She hated "Flaubert and Madame Bovary," Francis Steegmuller's ...