Early in 1965 I was working on a PhD dissertation about the fascinating confl uence of early modernist creative energies that had brought together the painters of the Stieglitz group and such younger poets as William Carlos Williams, Hart Crane, and quite a few others around the time of the 1913 Armory Show. It seemed to me that Alfred Stieglitz’s attempts to capture in his photographs what it meant to be an American, energized by the social dynamics of a young country caught between nature and a booming industrial environment (“America without that damned French fl avor,” as he put it), had been a major catalyst for most of the artists and writers involved. From our current vantage point it may seem hard to believe, but back in 1965, when I was a graduate student in the English Department at the University of California, Berkeley, Stieglitz had been all but forgotten as an artist. His contention that photography was a serious medium for artistic expression was still largely discounted as special pleading by most of the prominent critics of the time. Besotted with what they thought to be the transcendent intellectual signifi cance of abstraction, these critics equated the “vulgar materialism” of photography with an equally vulgar “sentimental literalism” of representational painting. Even so, poets such as Williams seemed to me to have found their voice by combining the rapid, “snapshot” insights of photography with the structural innovations opened up by the early modernist painters’ experimental disintegration of conventional form. Williams had died just two years earlier—one of the last members of the original circle of writers and artists who had gathered around Stieglitz. Georgia O’Keeff e, of course, was still alive, and just then in the process of recapturing considerable prominence in the art world with her near abstractions of the early 1960s—a prominence she had largely lost as a result of the sexist attacks on her work in the mid-1940s by critics such as Clement Greenberg and the death of Stieglitz, her greatest promoter. I wrote her, delineating my theories about her husband’s importance in the “discovery” of America by its artists and poets. Before long I received from her a letter—dated Abiquiu, March 24, 1965—in a handwriting I instantly recognized as heavily infl uenced—even in its dramatic use of pitch black ink and a broad-point pen—by the assertive fl ourishes and curlicues of Stieglitz’s own calligraphy. Bram Dijkstra