Excerpt from The American Spirit: Letters of Briggs Kilburn Adams

Adams. For some time he remained only a name to me; yet in the themes that bore his name I soon found myself taking a special interest. For they revealed two facts about him: he had spent the previous summer driving an ambulance in France, and he had unusual ability to describe what he had seen and felt.

When he came to me for a conference, I recognized in him the boy who had been sitting in the front row and look ing up at me during my occasional talks to the class, with an expression embarrassingly intent - relieved now and then from any suggestion of over-appreciation by a flicker, equally embarrassing, of quizzical humor. He was tall and well built and handsome; his bluish-gray eyes were shaded by long, curling eyelashes, his mouth had a gentle, sensitive curve, his fingers were long and slender, indicating the ex cellent musician that he was; he spoke in a low, rather slow voice, and seemed an attractive combination of shy reticence and willingness to be drawn out. He told me a little about his work in France - how he had driven wounded at four miles an hour. And suffered because he knew that even then the slight bumping over rough places was agonizing to them. The fine sensitiveness of a gentle and sympathetic nature showed in his talk, as always in his writing.

But none of his work at this time had the quality of thought and style to be found in the letters to the dearly-loved mem bers of his family after he had begun to fly. As I wrote to his father when a few of these letters first appeared in the Harvard Alumni Bulletin: He never wrote anything for me which could compare with these letters, and nothing else that has been written about the war, that I have read, can compare with them. They are the most beautiful bits of writing that have come out of the war beautiful in style and color and motion. No one else has taken me up in the air and shown me what it must be to fly; no one else has presented so Vivid a figure of war as it should be portrayed. And the little touch about perhaps finding his lost sister Carol on the other side of the next cloud, ' is one of those wonderful blts of _simplicity and imagination that come only to the gifted and are to be found only in great literature.

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