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SIGNATURES
Identified individuals are represented by a biographical sketch, a list of connections to other signatures, and, in most cases, an artifact from the Ransom Centers collections. Help us identify more signatures by submitting your suggested identification.
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THE DOOR
Location on door: front, panel 1
ROBERT L. WOLF
Writer Robert Leopold Wolf (b. 1895) rebelled against his wealthy upbringing to live a bohemian lifestyle. A year after graduating from Harvard in 1915, he was written up in the press for marrying his first wife, a Bryn Mawr student, by the unconventional means of signing of a joint contract. In the 1920s he lived in New York, where he met and married his second wife, poet Genevieve Taggard. He published verse and stories in a variety of little magazines and wrote one of the first reviews (for the New York World) of E. E. Cummings's debut collection of verse, Tulips and Chimneys (1923). Together with Taggard and several other door signatories, Wolf served as a contributing editor of the leftist journal New Masses. Wolf's marriage to Taggard was tempestuous, and the couple divorced not long after Wolf was institutionalized for mental illness in the early 1930s.
The cover, author's inscription to Christopher Morley, title page, and "The Public" from Robert L. Wolf's After Disillusion (New York: Thomas Seltzer, 1923)
Robert L. Wolf's volume of poetry, After Disillusion was published by Thomas Seltzer in 1923. Though its themes are often bohemian and anti-establishment, its forms are relatively conventional. Wolf's inscription to writer Christopher Morley references a poem in the collection that satirizes an attention-seeking, avant-garde poet named "Goliath."