Administrative Information

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Preferred Citation

Lumberjack Philosophy of Vachel Lindsay, Accession #6259-y, Special Collections Dept., University of Virginia Library, Charlottesville, Va.

Acquisition Information

This collection was purchased on 1995 January 10.

Scope and Content Information

Title Page reads Lumberjack Philosophy A Series of 30 Editorials Written For the Spokane Chronicle - By Vachel Lindsay Citizen of Springfield, Illinois Guest of Spokane , and illustrated with a pen and ink drawing of a campfire by Vachel Lindsay; Typed manuscripts of twenty-eight of the thirty editorials are present, consisting of 60 pages, with numerous pencil and ink autograph corrections in Lindsay's hand. In his beginning editorial, Lindsay admits that he has never been a lumberjack, "But I have associated on holidays with the type of man who is a lumberjack in the Northwest, a harvester in Kansas, a thinner-out of onions and beets in Colorado, a shipping clerk nailing the lids on boxes in Chicago, and on, further east... A man of the Northwest who is evolving a lumberjack philosophy with a genuine experience behind it, is the distinguished writer James Stevens. Go to the book shops. Buy his books. Find out how such men think. Read his Paul Bunyan. Think about it." Titles of the editorials are listed below:

1) Down Near the Railroad Stations
2) Things That Are Chatted About
3) Spokane Wheat and Spokane Wild Flowers
4) The Wheat Crop in Egypt
5) Keeping the Wild Flowers Wild
6) Wheat Is A Wild Flower
7) A Better Title for the Inland Empire
8) A Moral From the Custer Battlefield
9) Lead and Other Minerals
10) The Wild Flower Town Speaks for Itself
11) Let the Young Architects Speak Out
12) Anonymous Movies and Anonymous Architecture
13) Bridges and Viaducts
16) Anonymous Spokane and the London of Shakespeare
17) A Famous Cow-Town
18) The Grace Campbell Memorial Museum
19) What Is An Artist's Festival ?
20) Apples and Wenatches
21) Johnny Appleseed
22) Red Indians and the Red Indian Influence
23) On Patronizing the Indians
24) Abraham Lincoln, Rail Splitter and Lumberjack
25) A Moral for Salem, Illinois
26) Spokane is Superior to Springfield
27) Wrong About Everything, as Usual
28) Are Lumberjacks Philosophers ?
29) The Aviator is Our Hope
30) Wing-Room