1936 DEAN CORNWELL HAND SIGNED LETTER PERSONAL RARE WOW

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ITEM: You are bidding on a scarce original dated November 23, 1936 antique autographed signed letter by Dean Cornwell, the iconic American artist and illustrator on great personal letterhead. This letter is to friend and gossip columnist Mark Hellinger. From the collection of Mark Hellinger, who was at the time a leading gossip and culture correspondent for New York's Daily Mirror. The full text of this letter reads "Dear Hellinger: I am now doing a series of mural panels depicting the life of Sir Walter Raleigh for a new restaurant-bar in the Warwick Hotel. As part of this decoration scheme, t will be a running frieze composed of forty heraldic shields. In place of the conventional English shield which have no bearing on life today, I thought it would be fun and a lot more sensible to design new ones, in the traditional manner but representative of forty contemporary men who have been selected as outstanding in their respective fields. Your name has been chosen to be so honored and I trust I might have your consent to use it in conjunction with this unique mural. A few of the other names selected are: O.O. McIntyre, Floyd Gibbons, Walter Winchell, and Damon Runyon. As the shield must embody symbols of each man's vocation and personal background, I would greatly appreciate your noting on the enclosed slip any biographical data from which I could create the symbols on your shield. The room will open about the first of January and will be known as the Sir Walter Raleigh Room. It should prove to be very handsome and I would be very happy to have you among those to be commemorated on its walls. Very sincerely yours, Dean Cornwell." This comes from the collection of Mark Hellinger, a legendary figure in New York Theater and Golden Age Hollywood. Hellinger began his career as a New York entertainment and gossip columnist, who in the 1920s had a famemaking column that competed with Walter Winchell for the hearts of readers. Married to Gladys Glad, the most exquisite of Florenz Ziegfeld's Follies Girls, he feuded often and famously with Winchell, Ziegfeld, and a number of other figures of the day. Knowing everyone's secrets, Hellinger was an icon and staple in New York society in the 1920s, and a critical figure in pretty much any scene that mattered in the day. Ed Sullivan, Eddie Cantor and Evelyn Nesbit were among his closest friends, showing the variety of personalities he attracted. A center for the in jokes of the in crowd in the hard drinking speakeasy days of prohibition, he collected all of the correspondence from his famous and not so famous friends which amused him. His collection is among the finest we've come across. After leaving New York for Sunny Hollywood California in the 1930s, he became a film noir icon, and leading figure in the creation of a darker more gritty Hollywood. CONDITION: This original Dean Cornwell hand signed dated 1936 letter is in fine condition with original mailing folds and some adhesive on the back. It looks great and the signature is superb. 100% guaranteed vintage and original. Dean Cornwell began his career as an illustrator in 1914 and worked steadily at his avocation until his death at sixty-eight. His art appeared regularly in popular magazines and important books written by a number of the most outstanding authors, including Pearl S. Buck, Lloyd Douglas, Edna Ferber, Ernest Hemingway, W. Somerset Maugham, and Owen Wister. This left-handed illustrator painted more than twenty murals for various public institutions and in the process became one of the nation’s most popular muralists. Cornwell was born on March 5, 1892 in Louisville, Kentucky and his father, Charles L. Cornwell, a civil engineer, largely influenced the young boy’s interest in drawing perhaps from his own work drafting and particularly for industrial subjects. Because of his father’s engineering career, t were always sketches of bridges and railroads found around the Cornwell house and they intrigued young Dean as he found it incredulous that they could be drawn so exactly. A ... read more

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