11 December (1952): Raymond Chandler to Leonard Russell
Don’t think I’m anxious. Don’t think I’m disheartened...
10 December (1856): Gustave Flaubert to Léon Laurent-Pichat
At the time of its publication Madame Bovary was attacked by a chorus of critical voices for its painfully realistic depiction of bourgeois life. After...
9 December (1932): Marianne Moore to John Warner Moore, Jr.
Marianne Moore’s exacting descriptions of the natural world feature prominently in her poetry. While a student at Bryn Mawr Collecte she worked extensively in the...
6 December (1927): F. Scott Fitzgerald to Ernest Hemingway
I hear you were seen running through Portugal in used B.V.D.’s chewing ground glass and collecting material for a story about boule players; that you...
5 December (1961): John Cheever to John Weaver
“You cut that story,” I yelled, “and I’ll never write another story for your or anybody else. You can get that Godamned sixth-rate Salinger...
4 December (1912): Henry James to Edith Wharton
Henry James and Edith Wharton began writing to each other in 1900. Their correspondence marks one of the great literary friendships of the twentieth century....
3 December (1898): Anton Chekhov to Maxim Gorky
I actually felt envious at not having written it myself. You are an artist and an intelligent man. You have an admirable ability to...
2 December (1842): Prosper Mérimée to Unknown
I even admire coquetry and greediness, but only when one confesses them frankly.
29 November (1821): Percy Bysshe Shelley to Joseph Severn
In spite of his transcendent genius, Keats never was, nor ever will be, a popular poet; and the total neglect and obscurity in which the...
28 November (1874): Robert Louis Stevenson to Fanny Sitwell
However, thank God it is life I want, and nothing posthumous, and for two good emotions I would sacrifice a thousand years of fame...
27 November (1916): Virginia Woolf to Saxon Sydney-Turner
If you dont sleep or eat, your feelings will become so much of a puzzle that you’ll waste these exquisite days merely scratching your head....
26 November (1846): Fyodor Dostoevsky to Mikhail Dostoevsky
Brother, I am undergoing not only a moral, but a physical, metamorphosis.
25 November (1974): Ted Hughes to Gerald and Joan Hughes
The farm, you’ll be amused to hear, is still afloat—which is a miracle, considering the numbers of farmers going bankrupt, selling up, blowing their brains...
22 November (1829): William Makepeace Thackeray to Anne Carmichael-Smythe
I am sitting in a mans rooms with a most excellent bottle of Claret before me to wh. I have paid sincere & frequent visits,...
21 November (1962): Saul Bellow to Edward Shils
Bitter melancholy—one of my specialties—but sometimes I feel that certain of these old emotions have lost their hold. I realize they no longer have their...
20 November (1926): Langston Hughes to Carl Van Vechten
It comes out with a sardonic taste like the Blues, and before the evening was over everybody felt like whooping—and some did!
19 November (1952): Sylvia Plath to Aurelia Plath
I am driven inward, feeling hollow. No rest cure in the infirmary will cure the sickness in me...
18 November (1929): Federico Garcia Lorca to Carlos Morla Lynch
In the late 1920’s through the early 1930’s Federico García Lorca was living in Spain, devoting most of his time to script-writing for the theater group,...
15 November (1958): Anne Sexton to W.D. Snodgrass
I am not wise. But still, I am not cruel. I have no place loving you and because I let you be my god for...
14 November (1864): Lewis Carroll to Mary MacDonald
...there were no gates, so the gate-posts weren’t obliged to stay in one place—consequence of which, they went wandering all over the country—consequence of which,...
13 November (1936): Samuel Beckett to George Reavey
Will you therefore communicate to Mr Greenslet my extreme aversion to removing one third of my work, proceeding from my extreme inability to understand how...
12 November (1951): Dashiell Hammett to Jo Hammett
But we’ll see – It doesn’t make a great deal of difference to me whether I finish out my time now or go out on...
11 November (1979): Saul Bellow to Owen Barfield
The best of us have been destroyed in the wars of this century. Among the survivors there’s only the likes of ourselves to go on...
8 November (1941): Langston Hughes to Carl Van Vechten
The blues seems to be coming back in a big way. Every club out here now has a blues singer as part of the floor...
