5 February (1872): Ralph Waldo Emerson to John Muir
And there are drawbacks also to Solitude, who is a sublime mistress, but an intolerable wife.
4 February (1963): Ayn Rand to W.T. Stace
I would be very interested to hear your comments on the ethical alternative I discuss in that article—the example of the husband who has to choose between saving his wife or ten other women. Would you care to tell me which choice you would consider morally right?
3 February (1937): E.B. White to John R. Fleming
I am going to set a hen on some turkey eggs this spring to tone myself up and prove that a man can fail at more things than one.
2 February (1925): Willa Cather to President Tomáš Masaryk
The life of our Middle West is so big and various, so ugly and so beautiful, that one vcannot generalize about it. All one can do is to write of what came against one’s own door-step, so to speak.
30 January (1946): John Cheever to Josie Herbst
A lot of fairly conservative people (and the inflation has made a lot of people fairly conservative) speak continually of Communism; but I’m going all out for some form of sun worship.
29 January (1958): Elizabeth Bishop to Robert Lowell
They seem exactly like what I’d always wanted, vaguely, to hear and never had, and really “contemporary.” That strange kind of modesty that I think one feels in almost everything contemporary one really likes—Kafka, say, or Marianne, or even Eliot, and Klee and Kokoschka and Schwitters…Modesty, care, space, a sort of helplessness but determination at the same time.
28 January (1964): Mari Sandoz to Annie Laurie Williams
Encumbering Dull Knife with a fictitious son to steal the wife of his father’s great co-leader, Little Wolf, seems overt libel to me, compounded by the spurious killing of this non-existent son by Little Wolf. This is like making a picture in which Madison is given a son to steal the wife of Jefferson, who kills him for it.
27 January (1941): Edgar Rice Burroughs to Herbert T. Weston
What do you think of your old friend Mussolini now? He has been the one bright spot in my life during the past several weeks. Every morning I grab the paper to see what the Greeks or the English did to him the day before, and wait hopefully for what the Italians are going to do to him tomorrow…
26 January (1959): Dawn Powell to Phyllis Powell Cook
I couldn’t sleep because I have an appointment in two hours to see a man about a job—a role I haven’t played for some time. Do I come in with a curtsy or with a roar? Does he pay me or do I pay him?
23 January (1927): Lina Elise Grey to Zane Grey
If anything, I’d lay it to Mildred’s prattle about being your literary assistant and being so indispensable to you. She sure must have spread that thick all over the country. It comes back to me from the mountains and cities, the desert and sea.