A Treasured Frost Item
An important Robert Frost manuscript is to be added to the collection now housed in the new Frost Room in Dartmouth’s Baker Library.
The gift, being made by Mr. and Mrs: Richard H. Thornton of Oxford, N. C., consists of all the poems and supplementary text of Mr. Frost’s 1928 volume, West-Running Brook, a total of nearly sixty manuscript pages written out by the author himself and handsomely bound.
The holograph, as such a document is designated, has been in the possession of the Thorntons since the time, over three decades ago, when the book was being prepared for publication. It bears on its flyleaf an inscription “For Richard H. Thornton who published it from Robert Frost who wrote it: November 26 1929.” Mr. Thornton was then editor, and later became president, of Henry Holt and Company, Mr. Frost’s New York pub- lisher.
A supplementary inscription has now been added by the poet. Shortly before bis recent departure for Russia, Mr. Frost, in company with his secretary, Mrs. Theodore Morrison, and Mr. and Mrs. Thornton, visited the special room that has been set up within the Dart- mouth Library, and where the holograph was then being exhibited along with other of his works, and on that occasion penned beneath the original inscription a long and interesting statement “To com- memorate the day of Richard Thornton’s decision to consign this manuscript of my book West-Running Brook to Dart- mouth College Library. . ..”
The title West-Running Brook is de- rived from a New Hampshire stream that Mr. Frost had known well during his years of farming and teaching at Derry, N. H., in the southern part of the state, 1900-11.
The coming to Dartmouth of the West-Running Brook holograph follows by four months the poet’s own gift to the College of manuscript and associated materials relating to his current best- selling volume of poems. In the Clearing.
Mr. and Mrs. Thornton have indicated their intention to present to the Dart- mouth Library certain other Frost manu- scripts and letters which they have pre- served over the years.
Richard H. Thornton (second from right) and Mrs. Thornton shown in Baker Li-brary’s new Frost Room with Librarian Richard W. Morin ’24 and President Dickey,who is looking at the holograph of Robert Frost’s “West-Running Brook" which theihorntons plan to add to Dartmouth’s large and valuable Frost Collection. Robertrrost entered Dartmouth as a freshman seventy years ago this fall.
