9 June (1935): Katherine Anne Porter to Caroline Gordon
I don’t want to be a scourge to anybody, I merely would like to stop being a scourge to myself…
Staff
6 June (1837): Amos Bronson Alcott to Ralph Waldo Emerson
Quacks! Quackery! Poor sick, infirm, lunatic Humanity…
5 June (1928): Carl Sandburg to Helen Keller
Possibly the finest thing about your performance is that those who hear and see you feel that zest for living, the zest you radiate, is more important than any formula about how to live life…
4 June (1858): William Makepeace Thackeray to Adelaide Anne Procter
We can’t help what we write though; an unknown Something works within us and makes us write so & so…
3 June (1940): John Fante to Pascal Covici
I’ll write a book that will make any of Steinbeck appear like small peanuts. You keep this letter. You wait. You reread this letter in two years. You’ll see…
2 June (1924): F. Scott Fitzgerald to Maxwell Perkins
As a matter of fact the American peasant as “real” material scarcely exists…
What We’re Watching: Eileen Myles on Spoilage and Ruination of Other Kinds
As part of PEN’s World Voices Festival, poet Eileen Myles participated in the Obsession series at the Standard, East Village. Myles’ topic was “Spoilage”…
30 May (1870): Louisa May Alcott to the Alcott Family
We are now reveling in big strawberries, green peas, early potatoes, and other nice things, on which we shall grow fat as pigs.
29 May (1967): Allen Ginsberg to the General Public
Almost all official persons concerned seem subject to nineteenth century fainting spells, the official kind that our Eastern grandmothers complained of…
28 May (1886): Leo Tolstoy to V.G. Chertkov
The first awakening of his spiritual activity was revolutionary—scientific, as it’s called. What a terrible plague this is!…