21 March (1917): Thornton Wilder to Amos Wilder
If we were a sober, New England, around-the-lamp, co-praying family I insist, we should be less. Amos would be more docile; I less modern, Charlotte...
20 March (1951): Truman Capote to Robert Linscott
I don’t think Random House can fail to see what an extraordinarily beautiful thing this book can be...Maybe it seems strange that anyone should put...
19 March (1950): Martin Heidegger to Hannah Arendt
In recent days every passing hour carried you farther away to the city and, across the distance, brought what is most yours still closer. For...
18 March (1910): Franz Kafka to Max Brod
Franz Kafka and Max Brod met at Prague’s Charles University in 1902, where they were both students of the law. When Kafka shared his first...
17 March (1953): C.S. Lewis to Don Giovanni Calabria
“Post-Christian man” is not the same as “pre-Christian man”. He is as far removed as virgin is from widow: there is nothing in common except...
14 March (1833): Honoré de Balzac to Ewelina Hanska
My imagination, virile as it is, having never been prostituted or jaded, is an enemy for me; it is always in keeping with a young...
13 March (1961): C. Wright Mills to Walter Klink
But the one thing I have learned from the entire experience is a terrible thing: that the moral cowardice of the American intelligentsia is virtually...
12 March (1928): May Sarton to Abby and Mary Dewing
She was much surprised that I was to act instead of write. I guess she thinks I can't do it. She said I might find...
11 March (1907): W.E.B. Du Bois to M.B. Marston
I believe in full rights for human beings without distinction of race or sex. At the same time I hesitate to say anything concerning women’s...
10 March (1868): John Ruskin to Georgiana Cowper
For her, I have been silent in pain—for her I have labored, and wept; for her, I have died, for my heart is dead within...
7 March (1957): Sylvia Plath to Aurelia Plath
The next issue of Gemini (the new magazine) in May will carry three poems by Ted and a story and book review by me, and...
6 March (1948): Thomas Mann to Erich von Kahler
I can’t tell you, or can tell you only with awkward brevity, how your essay has moved and pleased me.
5 March (1900): Marcel Proust to Marie Nordlinger
But you are a poet and need not go into the fields to bring back flowers. Don’t complain about not having learned. There is nothing...
4 March (1927): Eugene O'Neill to Carlotta Monterey
Yes, I’ll admit nine acts and two evenings do sound a bit impractical but I don’t think they will be. I need a producer with...
3 March (1931): Joseph Roth to Friedrich Trangott Gubler
With all my skepticism, for all my self-analysis, I'm in love. I need it as a thirsty man needs water. And I know it's poison.
28 February (1932): Sherwood Anderson to Charles Bockler
…I’m becoming more and more a communist. I think it must be coming nearer—an inevitable thing. I guess this time is good for all of...
27 February (1933): Thomas Wolfe to Donald Chacey
Your letter also touched me up a bit and got me a little hot under the collar when you asked me if I was ever...
26 February (1899): Anton Chekhov to Lydia Alexeyevna
Theirs is not writing, but chirping; they chirp and then sulk. And I don’t like the writer Avilova because she writes so little. . Women...
25 February (1935): William Carlos Williams to Ronald Lane Latimer
This is what I’d say to our academic critics, if I were asked: …You are thinking of something very dead and likely to be smelly...
24 February (1926): Federico García Lorca to Melchor Fernandez Almagro
I am not carried away by music, like certain young poets. I grant love to the word (!) and not to the sound.
21 February (1855): Charlotte Brontë to Ellen Nussey
Charlotte Brontë met Ellen Nussey while attending the Roe Head school in Dewbury, Yorkshire, in 1833. The Reverend Brontë, believing Nussey to be a suitable...
20 February (1833): Nikolai Gogol to Mikhail Pogodin
Nikolai Gogol emerged on the Russian literary scene in 1831 with the publication of Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka. This initial success failed...
19 February (1949): Jean Grenier to Albert Camus
The love dialogues are beautiful, maybe a higher tone than the others, and on a different level.
18 February (1859): Gustave Flaubert to Marie-Sophie Leroyer de Chantepie
I am convinced that the most raging material appetites express themselves unwittingly in outbursts of idealism, just as the most obscene carnal expressions are engendered...
