15 September (1961): Anne Sexton to Anthony Hecht
To be your friend, a good close friend, is not complicated by neurotic demands. This is unusual. Maybe you don’t know it, damn it … but there aren’t many around like you (not any).
12 September (1939): W.C. Fields to Carlotta Monti
Is the gentleman you intend to marry financially solvent? Can he take care of you when he gets old like me? How long have you been keeping company with him, or did he ask you to marry him when you met him first time last evening in the elevator? Why didn’t you let me know about him before? I might have been able to give you some advice. This is all so sudden…
11 September (1967): Kurt Vonnegut to Robert Scholes
Let’s leave the writing to the writers, Scholes.
10 September (1953): Eudora Welty to William Maxwell
Long ago when my stories were short (I wish they were back) I used to use ordinary paste and put the story together in one long strip, that could be seen as a whole and at a glance—helpful and realistic.
9 September (1963): François Truffaut to Helen Scott
I now no longer think of anything but the film and making a good job of it.
Staff Picks: Print Favorites
This October, the American Reader is going (almost) all print. In celebration of this shift, the editors have put together an unranked list of twenty of our favorite stories, poems, plays and essays that have appeared in our print edition over the past two years.
8 September (1852): Karl Marx to Friedrich Engels
You will have observed from my letters that, as usual when I am in it myself and do not just hear about it from afar, I am wading through the shit with great indifference. But what’s to be done? My house is a hospital, and the crisis is getting so disruptive that it compels me to give it my all-highest attention. What’s to be done?
5 September (1951): Vladimir Nabokov to Edmund Wilson
I love to complain—this is why I am telling you all this.
4 September (1982): Václav Havel to Olga Havlová
Yes: man is in fact nailed down—like Christ on the cross—to a grid of paradoxes: stretched between the horizontal of the world and the vertical of Being; dragged down by the hopelessness of existing-in-the-world on the one hand, and the unattainability of the absolute on the other, he balances between the torment of not knowing his mission and the joy of carrying it out, between nothingness and meaningfulness.
3 September (1927): Sherwood Anderson to Gertrude Stein
I did not want to write anything that was not fun doing. I knew that if I went on trying to make my living by it I would soon be a hack.