Letters from a Prairie Garden

A collection of real letters exchanged between Edna W. Underwood and an artist she never met in person, their connection sparked by crossed telephone wires in a Midwestern hotel. He heard her laugh, dubbed her "the woman who laughs," and thus began an epistolary friendship with art at its heart. Written to a connoisseur of beauty, these letters traverse the landscape of early 20th-century American art and aesthetics, with the prairie stretching beyond the windows as Underwood describes what she sees, what she cherishes, and what she creates. The garden of the title is both literal and metaphorical: a space of cultivation, patience, and observation. These are not declarations but discoveries, offered freely across distance. For readers who cherish the intimacy of letters, who find meaning in the small exchanges between kindred spirits, this collection preserves a particular kind of American beauty: Midwestern, unsentimental, quietly radiant.