TYPED LETTER SIGNED BY AMERICAN DIPLOMAT POST WHEELER TO AUTHOR AND EDITOR ROSSITER JOHNSON.

- Typed double-spaced letter filling 1-1/2 sides of 2 sheets of American Embassy, Rome letterhead, 10-1/2 inches high by 8 inches wide. Signed "Post Wheeler / Secretary of Embassy" with 1 ink correction. The bottom corners of the pages are lightly creased & there is a light paper-clip mark to the right edge of the first sheet. Folded 3 times for mailing. Very good. Writing to thank Rossiter Johnson for a poem he has sent him, Wheeler confuses the recipient with Robert Underwood Johnson, who retired as editor of Century magazine in May 1913: "I note by the papers that you have given up the active editorship of the 'Century', and I hope this means that you are going to devote your time to some of those books of which I know your mind is full, but which we could never have hoped to enjoy as long as a daily and editorial routine absorbed you. According to nature's law of balance, what we shall gain in one way we must lose in another." Wheeler goes on to mention his own recently published collection of Russian folk tales. "This is the seventh year I have been working on my big Japanese folk-lore series, but I am afraid its finish is two or three years further."Post Wheeler [1869-1956] served as a career diplomat between 1906 and 1934. He was the second secretary of he United States legation to Japan from 1906 to 1909 and returned there as Charge d'Affaires between 1914 and 1916. He served at American legations and embassies in St. Petersburg, Rome [1912-1913], Tokyo, Stockholm, London and Rio de Janeiro and was appointed Ambassador to Albania by Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1933. The book of Japanese rakugo mentioned in his letter was planned as a ten-volume work but was never published owing to America's entry into World War II.…