I Call on Mme. Bianchi

Abstract

Benjamin B. Hickok was a twenty-year-old college junior when in 1934 he gained an impromptu interview with Martha Dickinson Bianchi while visiting the Emily Dickinson estate in Amherst. Bianchi, an editor and biographer of her famous aunt, and by then Dickinson's only living descendant, proved a lively and opinionated subject, offering insights that remain relevant to our understanding of the poet today. Benjamin Hickok went on to a long career as a professor at Michigan State University; this account of his talk with Bianchi, submitted at the time for a school assignment, was recently discovered among Hickok family papers and has been introduced and edited by Peter Schmitt.