18 July (1860): Henry James to Thomas Sergeant Perry
The women stop at home all day, doing the housework, drudging, and leading the most homely and I should say joyless lives. I fancy they...
17 July (1927): Frederico Garcia Lorca to Sebastian Gasch
...it is dangerous for one who lets himself be fascinated by the great dark mirrors that poetry and madness wield at the bottom of their...
16 July (1954): William S. Burroughs to Allen Ginsberg
Oh God! Am I going to start referring to love as The Phenomena? Sounds like some great man’s arch and rather nauseous private letters.
15 July (1954): Howard Moss to Elizabeth Bishop
It is unbelievable what people say about poetry—there must be a stable of morons somewhere kept exclusively for this purpose. When I find it, my...
12 July (1958): Ted Hughes to Aurelia Plath
This is one of the main problems in poetry writing I think, bringing your style to unity with your experience. It would be easy if...
11 July (1894): Anton Chekhov to Alexei Suvorin
My brain functions feebly and doesn’t want to get any more weighty impressions. I would prefer some sea bathing and nonsensical talk.
10 July (1913): Robert Frost to Sidney Cox
You must learn to take other people less uncritically and yourself more uncritically. You are all eaten up by the inroads of your own conscience.
9 July (1916): D. H. Lawrence to Catherine Carswell
Is there nothing beyond my fellow man? If not, then there is nothing beyond myself, beyond my own throat, which may be cut, and my...
8 July (1935): Thomas Wolfe to J.G. Stikeleather
I suppose it boils downs to this: you want to be a famous man and a great writer, and yet you want to lead...
4 July (1955): Jack Kerouac to Malcolm Cowley
I'm about ready not only to stop writing but to jump off a bridge. The canoe is in the middle of the rapids and I...
3 July (1952): Allen Ginsberg to Neal Cassady
I am miserable now—not feeling unhappiness, just lack of life coming to me and coming out of me—resignation to getting nothing and seeking nothing, staying...
2 July (1856): Leo Tolstoy to Nikolay Nekrasov
I don’t think such rubbish has ever been published in The Contemporary before—and not only The Contemporary—not in Russian or in any other language, I...
1 July (1915): Marcel Proust to Lucien Daudet
My life in bed for the last twelve years is indeed too sad for me to regret losing it.
29 June (1851): Herman Melville to Nathaniel Hawthorne
This is rather a crazy letter in some respects, I apprehend.
28 June (1935): Zelda Fitzgerald to F. Scott Fitzgerald
Had I any feelings they would all be bent in gratitude to you and in sorrow that of all my life there should not even...
27 June (1838): Charles Baudelaire to Caroline Aupick
I feel my life outside school approaching, and that causes me even more fear. All the people you have to get to know, all the...
26 June (1950): Saul Bellow to Oscar and Edith Tarcov
Grease on my cheeks—the fat of the season
Now dead and sealed, now dead and waxy.
Foxes yap on the tenement stairs;
Hope arrives in a Checker taxi.
25 June (1829): Johann Wolfgang von Goethe to Thomas Carlyle
I do hope you will be kind enough to satisfy a wish I often voice to my distant friends. When I come to visit them...
24 June (1824): Stendhal to the Comtesse Curial
As I pondered at my desk, with the shutters closed, my black grief found entertainment in composing the following letter which you will perhaps write...
21 June (1959): Flannery O'Connor to Dr. Ted R. Spivey
You can't trust them as poets either because they are too busy acting like poets. The true poet is anonymous, as to his habits, but...
20 June (1932): William Carlos Williams to Ezra Pound
This blasts out of existence forever all the puerile ties of the dum te dum versifiers and puts it up to the reader to be...
19 June (1950): Aldous Huxley to Basil Rathbone
I hope that all goes well, in spite of the miserable state of the world at large, with you and your family...
18 June (1858): Mark Twain to Mary E. Clemens
My poor Henry, my darling, my pride, my glory, my all, will have finished his blameless career, and the light of my life will have...
17 June (1845): Gustave Flaubert to Alfred LePoittevin
Back in my cave! Back in my solitude! By dint of being in a bad way, I’m in a good way...
