7 November (1922): T.S. Eliot to Ezra Pound
My own idea is that the way to make a review is to make it as unliterary as possible: there are only half a dozen...
6 November (1921): James Joyce to Harriet Weaver
I am very grateful for your unremitting loyalty to my troublesome self and interminable composition which is at last to be offered to a mystified...
5 November (1956): J. R. R. Tolkien to Mr. Britten
It is plainly suggested that Elves do ‘sleep’, but not in our mode, having a different relation to what we call ‘dreaming’...
4 November (1920): Virginia Woolf to Janet Bell
We are sitting in a brown vapour, hearing fog signals from time to time, while your moon, I suppose, is stuck among the apple trees...
1 November (1839): Juliette Drouet to Victor Hugo
The following letter was written to Victor Hugo by his mistress Juliette Drouet. The two began their affair in 1833 after the production of Hugo’s...
31 October (1925): Rainer Maria Rilke to Lou Andreas-Salomé
But victory did not come and neither did relief. I suppose the obsession to do oneself that old harm with all its aftereffects and menaces...
30 October (1959): William Burroughs to Allen Ginsberg
Thanks a million for the mescaline. Split it with Brion [Gysin] for a short trip home..
29 October (1952): Carl Sandburg to Paula Steichen
I think of you as my Mexican Zinnia. Others may have Mexicale Rose but you came in Zinnia time and I see three of them...
28 October (1863): Henry Wadsworth Longfellow to James Thomas Fields
Strange as you may think it, I find no longer any pleasure in such things, nor take any interest in going about among men. Whenever...
25 October (1814): Percy Bysshe Shelley to Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin
I will make this remorseless villain loathe his own flesh in good time; he shall be cut down in his season; his pride shall be...
24 October (1907): Marianne Moore to Mary and John Warner Moore
I have written, what I like better than anything I have ever writ before, a thing called “The Nature of a Literary Man.” Perhaps, “Pym.”...
23 October (1804): William Blake to William Haley
...but I was a slave bound in a mill among beasts and devils; these beasts and these devils are now, together with myself, become children...
22 October (1851): Charles Dickens to Thomas Robert Eeles
List of Imitation Book-Backs: Five Minutes in China. 3 vols., Forty Winks at the Pyramids. 2 vols., Abernethy on the Constitution. 2 vols., Mr. Green’s...
21 October (1908): Ezra Pound to William Carlos Williams
Then again you must remember I don't try to write for the public. I can't. I haven't that kind of intelligence. 'To such as love...
18 October (1916): Franz Kafka to Felice Bauer
Today I went around all morning very pensive and in a haze, continually worrying about the burned-out van in which it is highly probably that...
17 October (1976): John Cheever to Tanya Litvinov
Since you are an old, old friend you might like to know that the horse, to whom I feed apples, is well and comely and...
16 October (1879): George Eliot to John Cross
Though dost not know anything of verbs in Hiphil and Hophal or the history of metaphysics or the position of Kepler in science, but thou...
15 October (1958): Ernest Hemingway to Archibald MacLeish
You dope. Did you think I had forgotten Rue de Bac, juan les Pins, Zaragoza, Chartres, that place of Peter Hamiltons you lived, our bicycles,...
11 October (1917): Katherine Mansfield to Dorothy Brett
When you paint apples do you feel that your breasts and your knees become apples, too? Or do you think this is the greatest nonsense....
10 October (1869): Lewis Carroll to Georgina Watson
I had just time to look into the kitchen, and saw your birthday feast getting ready, a nice dish of crusts, bones, pills, cotton-bobbins, and...
9 October (1818) John Keats to James Augustus Hessey
I was never afraid of failure; for I would sooner fail than not be among the greatest—
8 October (1776): John Adams to Abigail Adams
In general, our Generals were outgeneraled on Long Island...
7 October (1948): Wallace Stevens to Thomas McGreevy
The house in which I was born and lived as a boy faced west and wherever I have lived if the house faced any other...
4 October (1960): Carl Sandburg to Paula Sandburg
Give this enclosure to whoever shd send me a ballot to mark for JFK—
