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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
CHARLES DIVINE
Charles Divine (1899-1950) was a writer who spanned a variety of genres--he was a journalist, poet, short story writer, novelist, and playwright. He started his career writing for the New York Sun and continued to write verse while serving in Europe with the 27th (New York) Division during World War I. Following the war, Divine published volumes of poetry and a WWI novel, Cognac Hill, as well as plays, two of which were adapted into short films. In the late 1940s, Divine served as an English Instructor at Triple Cities College in Endicott, NY.
The front cover, preliminary pages, and the poem "At the Lavender Lantern" in Charles Divine's City Ways and Company Streets (New York: Moffat, Yard & Company, 1918)
In the preface, Grant Overton, literary editor of the New York Sun, muses that this book ought to be subtitled "From Greenwich Village to Spartanburg." The opening poem, "At the Lavender Lantern," is written from the perspective of a soldier at war wondering after his old Greenwich Village haunt. "The Village, which spoils utterly so many talents, could not spoil Divine," Overton explains, "He saw its poetry and the real wistfulness that underlies the freakish surface." Divine's next two volumes of verse, Gypsy Gold (1923) and The Road to Town (1925) were published by fellow Greenwich Villager Thomas Seltzer.