29 March (1931): Sherwood Anderson to Charles Bockler
There are days when I am afraid of people. This is one of them...
28 March (1947): Raymond Chandler to Edgar Carter
In addition to writing detective novels, Raymond Chandler enjoyed a successful career in film and television. Here, he shares some of his views on the...
27 March (1894): Anton Chekhov to Lydia Mizinova
Though you scare me by saying you are going to die soon, and you twit me for throwing you over, thanks anyway. I know perfectly...
26 March (1928): James Joyce to Harriet Shaw Weaver
James Joyce was translating one of Aesop’s fables, “The Ant and the Grasshopper” for his book Finnegans Wake. In this meticulous letter to his editor and...
25 March (1914): Franz Kafka to Felice Bauer
Lasting from September 1912 to October 1917, Franz Kafka’s correspondence with Felice Bauer overlapped with his writing The Metamorphosis, In the Penal Colony, and the beginning of his...
22 March (1943): Wallace Stevens to Gilbert Montague
Here, Stevens explains the grounding for his Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction to a former classmate. This abstract work, really more like a treatise in verse, sought...
21 March (1925): F. Scott Fitzgerald to John Peale Bishop
In the letter below, F. Scott Fitzgerald writes drunkenly to fellow writer John Peale Bishop, who he had known their college days at Princeton. Fitzgerald...
20 March (1908): Marcel Proust to Anna de Noailles
Although the solemnity of sacraments of a legal kind like adoption no longer serves much purpose except to add a bit of spice to the...
19 March (1960): Flannery O'Connor to Betty Hester
I will admit it is very hard to thank an author for his book when you didn’t like it. Doubtless the Devil has a whole...
18 March (1903): Joseph Conrad to R.B. Cunninghame Graham
Joseph Conrad writes self-deprecatingly to Scottish politician and fellow adventurer R.B. Cunninghame Graham about Conrad’s latest book, Nostromo, which drew inspiration from Graham’s Vanished Arcadia, an account...
15 March (1853): Arthur Hugh Clough to Blanche Mary Shore Smith
Arthur Hugh Clough, English poet and onetime assistant to Florence Nightingale, writes to Mary Shore Smith, whom he would later go on to marry, about...
14 March (1927): Hart Crane to Allen Tate
An irreverent Hart Crane pokes fun at fellow poets Louis Gilmore and Marianne Moore, the presiding editor of The Little Review, in this bawdy letter...
13 March (1841): Nikolai Gogol to S.T. Aksakov
My work is great; my work is a way of salvation. I have died for everything trifling now; must I commit unforgivable crimes with daily...
12 March (1927): Federico García Lorca to Jorge Guillén
What deceit! It’s sad. But I’ve got to keep still. To speak would create a scandal...
11 March (1906): William Carlos Williams to Edgar Williams
In this letter, a young William Carlos Williams shows how delightfully he can turn a phrase before delving into his fascination with the accuracy of...
8 March (1847): Thomas Carlyle to Margaret A. Carlyle
Here, an older Thomas Carlyle writes to his mother, commenting on the ongoing Irish Potato Famine, before considering how his wealth has contributed to a...
6 March (1932): Hermann Hesse to Thomas Mann
Here, Hermann Hesse writes to Thomas Mann, his co-defender of the German humanistic tradition during the harrowing pivots and pitfalls of the 20th century. Mann,...
5 March (1845): Elizabeth Barrett Browning to Robert Browning
In the letter below, an exuberant Elizabeth Barrett Browning writes to Robert Browning, who she would marry the following year. Elizabeth Barrett Browning describes the...
4 March (1964): James Wright to Franz Wright
James Wright writes to his ten-year-old son, Franz Wright, who, like his father, would go on to become a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet...
1 March (1948): Dawn Powell to Margaret de Silver
Dos and I lavishly entertained his cousin and troops on my balcony and next day Dos and General Bradford and some marines who have attached...
28 February (1960): Czesław Miłosz to Thomas Merton
Miłosz writes to Merton, offering advice on how to make his literary work more accessible and appealing to non-Catholic readers...
27 February (1952): Allen Ginsberg to Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady
...my fantasies and phrases have gotten so lovingly mixed up in yours, Jack, I hardly know whose is which and who’s used what...
26 February (1979): Ted Hughes to Terry Gifford and Neil Roberts
In the letter below, Ted Hughes responds to two scholars about a “mistake” in the final line of his poem, “Walking Bare.” While he agrees...
25 February (1935): W. B. Yeats to Margot Ruddock
"Kipling and I, though we have never met, wrote when very young men for a review edited by the poet W.E. Henley. He rewrote us...
