Memoirs and Letters was first published in 1934. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

This volume, the last in a set of four containing posthumous works of Oscar W. Firkins, consists mainly of some two hundred personal letters, which reveal many delightful facets of a unique character.

Oscar W. Firkins—critic, biographer, playwright, lecturer, and teacher—was regarded as a recluse, living in a world peopled largely by "poets dead and gone" and the creatures of their imagination and his own. That he enjoyed warm friendships with men and women of his time is brought to light in these miscellaneous letters: letters to clergymen and children, to editors and club women, to students and poets, to actors and college deans.

Many brilliantly epigrammatic comments from Firkins' famous classroom lectures are included in the section of this book entitled "From Oscar Firkins' Notebooks." The "Estimate and Appreciation" with which the volume opens is by Dr. Richard Burton, for many years a colleague of Professor Firkins at the University of Minnesota. "Oscar Firkins as a Teacher" is contributed by a former student. A complete bibliography, compiled by Ina Ten Eyck Firkins, concludes the volume.

The Bride of Quietness and Other Plays was first published in 1932. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.Oscar Firkins’ books, posthumously published, are finding what the author, during his reclusive life, never looked for – popularity, that wide appeal which is evinced in the demand for a second edition of this book of plays and the friendly reception that has resulted in putting both his plays and the more recently published Memoirs and Letters on “bestseller” lists.John Keats, in a London twilight finds himself one wit the immortal figures of his Ode on a Grecian Urn. That timelessness of beauty to which he gave serene expression in his famous ode is the theme of The Bride of Quietness, the title play of this volume. The romantically wedded Brownings of Turnpikes in Arcady discover, under the spell of an Italian night, that they are not at all the “practical” persons they have supposed themselves to be. Charlotte, Emily, and the other enigmatic Brontës are vividly revealed in the brief, incisive lines of Empurpled Moors. A sprightly Restoration atmosphere pervades The King’s Vigil, in which Samuel Pepys and Charles II spend a night cloistered behind a massive oak door in hiding from importunate wives and mistresses.

The Revealing Moment and Other Plays was first published in 1932. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

"Sparkling wit, brilliancy of phrase, vivid character portrayal, erudition, taste, a delicate sense of proportion, and a genuinely felicitous style"—these are only a few of the critics' judgments on Mr. Ferkins' previously published plays.

Selected Essays was first published in 1933. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

Professor Firkins' reputation as a writer whose work combines the qualities of thought and style, of penetrating criticism and epigrammatic wit, is amply upheld by these seventeen essays.

The volume opens with "Man: A Character Sketch," which Christopher Morley has described as a "brilliant essay in spiritual anthropology." Emerson and Howells, on both of whom Mr. Firkins was a recognized authority, are each the subject of an essay. Glimpses of the author's boyhood and of his remarkable mother are given in "Undepicted America," which is the development of an original theory concerning American letters. In "The Irresponsible Power of Realism" the author flays some modern tendencies in literature and in "The Sermon on the Mount" he sets forth the basic principles of his humanistic religious views.

A few of these essays are here published for the first time. Most of them, however, have been selected as representative of Mr. Firkins' best published work in the field of the critical essay.

Power and Elusiveness in Shelley was first published in 1937. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

This is a discussion in measured prose of the strange yet frequent union of various abstract elements in Shelley's poetry. The study contains an interesting analysis of the thesis that Shelley's "love of abstraction is only one form—probably the most obvious and the most significant form—of a larger and more general tendency." The object of this essay, in the author's words, "is to collect and combine the manifestations of this larger tendency."

The two great "abstractions" that Firkins selects as the touchstones in his study he generalizes as "power" and "elusiveness," and he shows how these seemingly antithetical qualities are united in both the structure and the style of all Shelley's chief poems.