MARLBOROUGH, MASS.- Bonhams Skinner unveiled several highlight lots to be featured in an upcoming Books & Manuscripts sale. The online auction, which will take place August 15 – 23 on Bonhams Skinner’s website and will be accompanied by a digital catalog, includes personal and handwritten correspondence from major American personages of the 20th Century, including actress and Princess of Monaco Grace Kelly, biographer and poet Carl Sandburg and civil rights activist and congressman John Lewis.

A fantastic array of handwritten letters and postcards from Princess Grace appear in the sale, including on Palais de Monaco letterhead. Addressed to a Mrs. Arthur Pinney, these letters represent the lively and lifelong correspondence between Kelly and her close childhood friend, referred to in her letters affectionately as “Margie.” Raised together in the Philadelphia suburbs before Kelly’s outstanding career as a Hollywood actress and subsequent marriage to Prince Rainier III, the consignor remained in close correspondence throughout Kelly’s life, and served as a confidant and sympathetic ear to one of the most public-facing figures of the 20th Century. This archive of a friendship – spanning from Kelly’s coronation in the mid-50s through the rest of her life – appears in the online auction alongside a sizable collection of royal wedding invitations, archival photographs and other occasional memorabilia sent by the Princess to her homeland companion.

Equally passionate and revealing of their singular author are a series of letters, handwritten notes and signed dedications by the great poet and biographer Carl Sandburg, made out to the New York artists Len and Olga Steckler. Members of an artist and writer’s colony that Sandburg once visited, the Stecklers became close friends and early readers of the eminent American poet from the early 1950s until his death in 1967. His affection for them is clear in a number of effusively dedicated publications (many of them first editions) and memoranda from Sandburg’s own desk: in one letter, he refers to the couple as his “partners, [and] not merely dancing partners, what with the good work we get done.” After winning a Pulitzer Prize for his multi-volume biography of Abraham Lincoln, Sandburg became a popular authority on the American Civil War; included in this sale is a copy of the Gettysburg Address which he read on CBS Today in 1961, in honor of the war’s centenary, and later passed on to Olga with a handwritten note of appreciation.

Finally, this sale is notable for an original draft of a 1979 letter sent by John Lewis to a curious reader of Southern Exposure, in which Lewis makes a principled and passionate case for the nonviolent activism he studiously employed during the civil rights movement. Responding to an inquiry from a Massachusetts journalist about the nature of his background in non-violence, Lewis – who passed away in 2020 as a lauded Congressional representative, and was at the time of writing this letter the Associate Director of the federal volunteer agency ACTION – steadfastly defends non-violent intervention as “more than just a tactic” employed by civil rights movement leadership. “For me and for many others, nonviolence had become a discipline, a philosophy, a way of life.” The letter, which goes on to elucidate the history of the nonviolent movement, from Gandhi through Rev. James Lawson’s impact on Martin Luther King, incorporates a moving appeal for empathy beyond race and background – a fine representation of what makes Lewis’s legacy one of the most singular and significant in recent American history.