In addition to writing detective novels, Raymond Chandler enjoyed a successful career in film and television. Here, he shares some of his views on the unscriptability of Scripture with his television agent, Edgar Carter. To Edgar Carter March 28, 1947 … Continued

Though you scare me by saying you are going to die soon, and you twit me for throwing you over, thanks anyway. I know perfectly well you aren’t going to die and nobody threw you over…

James Joyce was translating one of Aesop’s fables, “The Ant and the Grasshopper” for his book Finnegans Wake. In this meticulous letter to his editor and patron Harriet Shaw Weaver, he tries to explain many of his word choices by way of … Continued

Lasting from September 1912 to October 1917, Franz Kafka’s correspondence with Felice Bauer overlapped with his writing The Metamorphosis, In the Penal Colony, and the beginning of his work on The Trial.  Although stiflingly self-conscious, Kafka was a fervent womanizer, carrying on numerous … Continued

Here, Stevens explains the grounding for his Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction to a former classmate. This abstract work, really more like a treatise in verse, sought to develop a narrative to fill the void left by conventional religion.    690 Asylum … Continued

In the letter below, F. Scott Fitzgerald writes drunkenly to fellow writer John Peale Bishop, who he had known their college days at Princeton. Fitzgerald outlines a “new work, a historical play based on the life of Woodrow Wilson.”   … Continued

Although the solemnity of sacraments of a legal kind like adoption no longer serves much purpose except to add a bit of spice to the banality of irregular situations, I cannot believe that he wanted to disguise a commonplace homosexual adventure with the infinitely respectable trappings of incest…

I will admit it is very hard to thank an author for his book when you didn’t like it. Doubtless the Devil has a whole roomful of penmen in hell practicing such letters.

Joseph Conrad writes self-deprecatingly to Scottish politician and fellow adventurer R.B. Cunninghame Graham about Conrad’s latest book, Nostromo, which drew inspiration from Graham’s Vanished Arcadia, an account of Jesuit missionaries in Paraguay. Conrad playfully describes his own inability to master the austere … Continued