To the Editors:
Regarding Robert Phillips’s “Visiting the Gregorys” (September 1990): To prevent creative malice from turning first into “plausible explanation” and eventually into “fact,” the truth is that Louise Bogan did not race around town announcing she’d gotten the Pulitzer. The simple reason she didn’t is that—Marya Zaturenska to the contrary—Bogan was never aware of being chosen for the prize. By 1941 she was even joking with Malcolm Cowley about “starting a society called Friends of L. Bogan: Why Doesn’t She Win the Pulitzer?” Why not indeed.
What amuses, however, is that in spreading the misinformation, even Zaturenska saw herself as coming in second to Bogan.
Ruth Limmer
Elizabeth Frank
New York, NY
