Hotels were one of Cornell's great themes, spurred perhaps by his own early life. Cornell was born on Christmas Eve, 1903, in Nyack, N.Y., the same dilapidated Hudson River resort, clotted with old hotels, where Edward Hopper was born a couple of decades earlier. These two American originals, as Cornell biographer Deborah Solomon remarks, shared an obsession with hotels and loneliness. Whatever promise Cornell might have shown during his stint as a science major at Phillips Academy in Andover, Mass., was dashed in 1917 with the death of his father, a prosperous traveling salesman. When the family downscaled to New York City, Cornell supported his mother and younger brother, Robert (born with cerebral palsy), with a series of awful jobs: selling textiles, working in a garden nursery, etc. Cornell's idea of travel was to take long walks around lower Manhattan, scavenging in used-book stores and record shops. Cornell collected 19^th-century guidebooks and cutout ads for modest Parisian hotels, which he liked to imagine as inhabited by aspiring divas and ballerinas. This box is equipped with two slat inserts decorated on both sides to vary the scene out the window. With a drab brown background, the box looks like a grim hotel room in a grim city—Bartleby's domain. With a constellation, though, it looks like a little stained-glass gateway to heaven.