Roger Hill's letter to Cornell College online

[RayKelly]

Letters of Note has provided an online copy of Roger Hill's Sept. 6, 1931 letter to Cornell College on behalf of Orson Welles. It is a letter any high school student would likely kill to have their teacher write. Hill describes Welles as "definitely talented to the point of genius."
He does admit Welles was weak in mathematics but "his education in all cultural subjects is now beyond that of the ordinary college graduate."
There are some personal bits, including Welles' trips abroad and family details: "His mother and father are dead, his guardian is Dr. Maurice Bernstein, well known Chicago orthopedist but probably better known just now through the newspaper publicity in regard to his divorce from his prima donna wife, Edith Mason."
(Welles turned down offers to study at Cornell and Harvard).
Read the letter at http://www.lettersofnote.com/2011/09/he-is-talented-to-point-of-genius.html

[mteal]

That's great Ray, never seen that before. Welles's mediocre Math skills might have limited the number of colleges he could have applied for, but from that letter it sounds as though he could have had some great scholarship opportunities. The math problem was there at an early age, as the end of this 1926 Madison article shows:

http://web.me.com/mteal1/Site_25/OW_at_10_files/OW%20at%2010.pdf

[ToddBaesen]

Quite a nice find, Ray!

I was thinking it was Cornell University, until I noticed the location as being in Mt. Vernon, Iowa. Obviously, Welles didn't want to go to Harvard, either, but I really don't think Mt. Vernon, Iowa would hold much interest for him when he had has eyes on Broadway.

[Glenn Anders]

One thing which suddenly strikes me amazing (though it should not) is that Welles was rare, even among "boy geniuses." A fair number of them are written up each year, but like "The Quiz Kids" of the 1940's, they seldom do much extraordinary in their adult lives. Welles did.

I also liked Roger Hill's reference to Welles' trip to Central Europe. We see the influence of that experience in his life and work, but unlike his journey through Ireland, we don't have much of a record. Nor of the journey to China, for that matter. Curious that such a precocious lad, such an apparently gregarious one, would not have made friends here and there, would not have had correspondence, indeed love letters. Do the scholars among us find much of that?

Glenn Anders