cover image Brushes with the Literary: Letters of a Washington Artist, 1943-1959

Brushes with the Literary: Letters of a Washington Artist, 1943-1959

Marcella Comes Winslow. Louisiana State University Press, $29.95 (395pp) ISBN 978-0-8071-1761-3

This collection of more than 200 letters written by Winslow to her mother-in-law, Tennessee novelist Anne Goodwin Winslow ( The Springs ), provides a glimpse into the literary life of Washington, D.C., during the 1940s and 1950s. After the wartime death of her husband left her a widow with two children, Winslow augmented her small income from the sale of her art by painting portraits of writers, including Katherine Anne Porter, Eudora Welty, Ezra Pound, Robert Frost and Allen Tate. Winslow's detailed and witty correspondence discusses the difficulties of her widowhood, as well as the pleasures of her long friendship with Tate and his wife, novelist Caroline Gordon. Winslow rented a room to Porter, and her description of the fiction writer's emotional problems is marked by understanding and affection. An exhibition of Winslow's portraits, several of which are reproduced here, will open at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C., in July. (May)