The Letters of Oscar Hammerstein II

"It turns out the lyric writer who reinvented Broadway form in Showboat and Oklahoma! just about always waxed eloquent — even in casual correspondence. In The Letters of Oscar Hammerstein II, that expressiveness is on display, whether it was to convince his own lawyer that he’d invented the phrase “Old Man River” and could therefore copyright it, or disabuse a nitpicker’s notion that the chorus of “Some Enchanted Evening” was ungrammatical. Missives politely declining to turn Tevye’s Daughters, Pygmalion and Don Quixote into Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals, or urging celebrities to join him in promoting a post World War II “World Government,” are mere nuggets in a treasure trove of epistolary charm."