…I had always made my living by writing advertisements. Hated to go back to that but had made up my mind to do it. Then something came up.

Below, Nietzsche pens an energetic—and, perhaps, uncharacteristically mirthful—dispatch to his mother, Franziska Oehler. The letter was, in part, compensatory, as Nietzsche himself was supposed to arrive at his mother’s at roughly this time. Of this incident, Nietzsche’s sister noted: “The … Continued

One of these days I’ll send you one of me and two of my friends but my friends are not very cooperative about having their pictures struck—don’t like to be seen with me or something.

Below, poet Kenneth Patchen responds to New Directions Press founder James Laughlin’s frenzied, combative, and actually-kind-of-funny dispatch (which we published here on Monday) regarding the poet’s seeming failure to send vast numbers of NDP books to retailer. Patchen’s reply was … Continued

And yet I would so much like the ‘Unknown Lady’ to speak to me…

“Now WHAT IS THE TROUBLE? I can’t dope it out. Are you eating the orders? Are you using them to paper the walls of your private megalomaniacal world? Or what?”

Below, Balzac writes to longtime mistress Ewelina Hańska from his sick bed in Paris. Suffering from a crippling attack of  “cerebral neuralgia,” Balzac variously instructs, exalts, and admonishes Hańska for her apparent “indifference” to him. In 1850, after a nearly twenty-year … Continued