Margaret Widdemer
Margaret Widdemer (1884-1978) was an American author who won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry (known then as the Columbia University Prize) in 1919 for her collection The Old Road to Paradise (1918). She shared the prize with Carl Sandburg, who won for his collection Corn Huskers (1916). Margaret Widdemer was born in Doylestown, Pennsylvania. She grew up in Asbury Park, New Jersey. She graduated from the Drexel Institute Library School in 1909. She came to public attention with her poem The Factories (1917), which treated the subject of child labor. In 1919 she married Robert Haven Schauffler (1879-1964), a widower five years her senior. Schauffler was an author and cellist who published widely on poetry, travel, culture, and music. Widdemer's memoir Golden Friends I Had (1964) recounts her friendships with eminent authors such as Ezra Pound, F. Scott Fitzgerald, T. S. Eliot, Thornton Wilder, and Edna St. Vincent Millay.
“But when your heart is tired and dumb, your soul has need of ease,There’s none like the quiet folk who wait in libraries–The counselors who never change, the friends who never go,The old books, the dear books that understand and know!”
“For some reason she found that Allan Harrington's attitude of absolute detachment made the whole affair seem much easier for her. And when Mrs. Harrington slipped a solitaire diamond into her hand as she went, instead of disliking it she enjoyed its feel on her finger, and the flash of it in the light. She thanked Mrs. Harrington for it with real gratitude. But it made her feel more than ever engaged to marry her mother-in-law.”
“He must have been delightful," she said, "when he was alive!”
“He looked like a young Crusader on a tomb. That was Phyllis's first impression of Allan Harrington.”
“It was four o'clock of a stickily wet Saturday. As long as it is anything from Monday to Friday the average library attendant goes around thanking her stars she isn't a school-teacher; but the last day of the week, when the rest of the world is having its relaxing Saturday off and coming to gloat over you as it acquires its Sunday-reading best seller, if you work in a library you begin just at noon to wish devoutly that you'd taken up scrubbing-by-the-day, or hack-driving, or porch-climbing or- anything on earth that gave you a weekly half-holiday!”
“And the way you lost your temper!" went on Wallis enthusiastically. "Oh, Mr. Allan, it was beautiful! You haven't been more than to say snarly since the accident! It was so like the way you used to throw hair-brushes--”
“Wallis," said his master dreamily when his man appeared again, "I want some more real clothes. Tired of sleeping-suits. Get me some, please. Good night.”
“And remember, Wallis, there's something the matter with Mr. Allan's shutters. They won't always close the sunshine out as they should."Wallis almost winked, if an elderly, mutton-chopped servitor can be imagined as winking."No, ma'am," he promised. Something wrong with 'em. I'll remember, ma'am.”
“Pain has been and grief enough and bitterness and crying,Sharp ways and stony ways I think it was she trod;But all there is to see now is a white bird flying,Whose blood-stained wings go circling high—circling up to God!”