JJLS VICE PRESIDENT RAY ELLIOTT'S LETTER
TO ROBINSON NEWSPAPER 


Date: 04/18/2005
To: Robinson Daily News
Subject: Letter to the Editor

Dear Editor:
I'd like to publicly thank the Robinson Public Library staff and board, and particularly Linda Phillippe and Maxine Zwermann, for inviting me to speak about James Jones as a part of the Illinois Humanities Council's Road Scholar program and to help celebrate National Library Week. Robinson has much to celebrate with one of the nicest and best equipped small-town libraries of any I've seen anywhere. It's something I know Robinson residents are rightly proud of to have available for everyone there.

And Robinson has much to be proud of as the hometown of an internationally renowned author. With that in mind, I'd like to invite you all to join the James Jones Literary Society (P.O.Box 68, Robinson, IL 62454; $15 annually for an individual; $25 per couple) to help keep his name alive in American letters and to help keep Robinson on the map as his hometown. His writing career was spawned in the old Robinson Public Library and his work undoubtedly will be read  for years to come. As Willie Morris noted in his book, James Jones: A Friendship, "It is a compelling thought to ponder that this boy from Robinson, Illinois, from all the countries, is the one person to have given us this stunning corpus of work (about World War II) that will be read and remembered and reread five hundred years from now."

Ray Elliott
Vice President
The James Jones Literary Society


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Ray Elliott
Tales Press
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Urbana, IL 61802
217 384-5820
217 384-7996 (fax)
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