17 February (1906): George Bernard Shaw to H.G. Wells
It is our business & yours to create an issue; and if you consider your feelings or ours in the matter you are simply unfit...
14 February (1927): Frederico García Lorca to Jorge Guillén
In this letter Frederico García Lorca addresses Jorge Guillén, fellow poet and member of the Generation of ’27. “Solitude,” excerpted below, took a long time...
13 February (1921): T.S. Eliot to Charlotte Stearns Eliot
1. When you are coming.
2. How much you are willing to pay (per week) for board and lodging.
3. Whether you wish lodgings, or as I...
12 February (1891): Charles Chesnutt to George Washington Cable
...and the Negro question, I am convinced, will become a more and more prominent subject of discussion until there is a radical departure at the...
11 February (1933): John Steinbeck to Robert Ballou
My wife says she would much rather go out and meet disaster, than to have it sneak up on her. The attacking force has the...
10 February (1923): E.B. White to Alice Burchfield
I had a lot of fun tonight making out my Income Tax report for the past year. My earnings amounted to $1,002.55. My exemption was...
7 February (1817): Percy Bysshe Shelley to Thomas Jefferson Hogg
Like all egotists, I shall console myself with what I may call, if I please, the suffrages of the chosen few, who can think and...
6 February (1865): Stéphen Mallarmé to Henri Cazalis
That distress you feel at the hour when dreams and the pillow must be left and you must enter the cold day which holds no...
5 February (1951): Raymond Chandler to Edgar Carter
My filing case opens out into a very convenient portable bar, and the bartender, who lives in the bottom drawer, is a midget named Harry...
4 February (1918): H. L. Mencken to Philip Goodman
H. L. Mencken and Philip Goodman became close friends while growing up in the German-American neighborhood of West Baltimore. In 1918, Goodman (now a New...
3 February (1850): Emily Dickinson to George H. Gould
Sir, I desire an interview; meet me at sunrise, or sunset, or the new moon—the place is immaterial. In gold, or in purple, or sackcloth—I...
31 January (1976): Vladimir Nabokov to Samuel Rosoff
I am still at war with Field, who turned out to be a rat, and am forcing him to delete or alter all sorts of...
30 January (1870): Walt Whitman to William Rosetti
My dismissal from moderate employment in 1865 by the Secretary of the Interior, Mr. Harlan, avowedly for the sole reason of my being the author...
29 January (1953): Herman Hesse to Thomas Mann
There is something strange and mysterious about our feeling (for I certainly feel the same way) that our work is not the "real thing," that...
28 January (1900): Anton Chekhov to Mikhail Osipovich
I fear Tolstoy’s death. His death would leave a large empty space in my life. First, I have loved no man the way I...
27 January (1975): John Cheever to the Friday Club
I do appreciate the table-mat correspondence and I hate to bring a touch of gloom into the Friday Club but this place is straight asshole...
24 January (1933): Henry Miller to Anaïs Nin
I am amazed at my own selfishness. When I bought the book I felt like a worm.
23 January (1938): John Steinbeck to Joseph and Charlotte Jackson
During the Great Depression John Steinbeck traveled through the Central Valley, recording observations of impoverished agrarian communities for the San Francisco Chronicle. In the midst...
22 January (1947): E.E. Cummings to Hildegarde Watson
In her will, she asked that her eyes (which had never failed her) be given to any blind person who through them might see...
21 January (1948): Albert Camus to Jean Grenier
We do not think enough about pain. Man is not innocent and he is not guilty. How to get out of that?
20 January (1954): William Carlos Williams to Ralph Nash
For no one to the present moment has so looked within me, if anyone has been interested in me enough to make the attempt, to...
17 January (1956): Flannery O'Connor to Betty Hester
...at their hands I developed something the Freudians have not named—anti-angel aggression, call it. From 8 to 12 years it was my habit to seclude...
16 January (1875): George Sand to Gustave Flaubert
George Sand and Gustave Flaubert differed markedly in both personal disposition and belief. Sand, the ever-impetuous, considered ideas or archetypes in abstract forms. Flaubert recorded...
15 January (1954): James Schuyler to Frank O'Hara
First the worst: your five dollar check bounced. N’import. I made it good...
