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“Kipling and I, though we have never met, wrote when very young men for a review edited by the poet W.E. Henley. He rewrote us both—I never complained and never heard that Kipling did. I admit that some years later when he rewrote Henry James, ‘The screams of Henry James’, as a friend of mine said, ‘filled the universe.’”

After meeting at a New York dinner party, Elizabeth Bishop, who had just won the Houghton Mifflin Poetry Prize Fellowship, and Robert Lowell, fresh off winning the Pulitzer Prize, began a friendship that would include over three decades of intimate … Continued

In the letter below, Anton Chekhov writes to A.S. Suvorin, offering his thoughts on several of Ivan Turgenev’s works. Although Chekhov was impressed by “Fathers and Children,” he found Turgenev’s portrayal of women underwhelming. February, 1893. My God! What a … Continued

Herman Melville had a profound, near-devotional admiration for Nathaniel Hawthorne, viewing him as the finest novelist of his day, a craftsman far superior to Melville himself. Melville credited Hawthorne with inspiring the tremendous growth in formal, stylistic and thematic complexity evident … Continued

  In the letter below, Oscar Wilde writes to friend, mentor, and alleged lover Robert Baldwin Ross. After Wilde’s imprisonment, Ross went abroad for safety, but eventually returned to offer financial and emotional support to Wilde. [February 1899] My Dear … Continued

In this letter, a characteristically reclusive Søren Kierkegaard writes to Julie Thomsen, his cousin, about his tumultuous relationship with writing  and his enslaving inability to leave “the pen” even if only to seek out the company of others.  TO JULIE THOMSEN … Continued