Oh, what a beautiful archive: Oscar Hammerstein's letters reveal his many sides
When you've written the lyrics to 850 songs, including standards from such transformative Broadway classics as Show Boat, South Pacific and Oklahoma!, you might well be tempted to put down your pen on occasion.
But the 1088-page volume The Letters of Oscar Hammerstein II establishes that lyricist/librettist Hammerstein rarely did that. The book's editor, Mark Eden Horowitz, a senior music specialist at the Library of Congress, says he read virtually all of the 25,000 letters in the Library's Oscar Hammerstein Collection, "and ended up transcribing over 4,600 of them...the best ones."
The best-of-the-best made it into the volume – letters that showcase not just the creative Hammerstein, but Hammerstein the businessman, the mentor, the activist, and occasionally, the corrector. That last persona surfaced when a magazine asked permission to quote his lyrics for "Ol' Man River."
"He just keeps rollin'..."
Actor Harry Winter read Hammerstein's response — to audience chuckles — in produced by the Library of
