December 11 (1962): Thornton Wilder to Catherine Coffin
Beginning in early 1962, Thornton Wilder lived for some twenty months in the small town of Douglas, Arizona. He told his nephew that he hoped...
December 10 (1850): Søren Kierkegaard and Lodovica de Bretteville
A letter to Kierkegaard from a fan and admirer, along with Kierkegaard's response.
7 December (1971): William Empson to Francis Doherty
Below, William Empson writes to Francis Doherty, a scholar specializing in the work of Samuel Beckett. Empson finds fault with Doherty’s book-length treatment of his...
6 December (1926): C. S. Lewis to Arthur Greeves
C. S. Lewis and Arthur Greeves first met as young boys, residents on the same Belfast street. From their childhood meeting until Lewis’s death in...
5 December (1935): Elias Canetti to Georges Canetti
Below, Elias Canetti’s response to his brother’s (apparently trenchant, generally positive) criticisms of Auto-da-Fé. Elias Canetti was thrilled with the novel’s overwhelmingly positive reception, confiding to...
4 December (1953): Saul Bellow to Bernard Malamud
A novel, like a letter, should be loose, cover much ground, run swiftly, take risk of morality and decay. [...] You let the errors come....
3 December (1953): Jack Kerouac to Carolyn Cassady
Below, Jack Kerouac responds to an invitation from Carolyn Cassady (Neal Cassady’s wife) to come west for the winter and take a job as...
29 November (1913): Marcel Proust to Robert Dreyfus
Below, the fascinating fragment of a (now lost) letter from Marcel Proust to Robert Dreyfus, high school friend and renowned historian of the Third...
28 November (1964): Vladimir Nabokov to Alfred Hitchcock
Below, Nabokov responds to Hitchcock’s letter of 19 November with a few screenplay ideas of his own. Hitchcock would reply that his needs were “immediate...
27 November (1939): Dylan Thomas to Kenneth Patchen
Below, a strange, roving, wonderful letter from Dylan Thomas to Kenneth Patchen, touching on everything from the charitable habits of the Welsh to Thomas’ desperate...
26 November (1935): Joseph Roth to Stefan Zweig
"If you don’t come till January, I fear you’ll only find me half alive. The Christmas holidays in particular I will NOT be able to...
23 November (1925): Cesare Pavese to Mario Sturani
Sculpture and ceramicist Mario Sturani was, by all accounts, Cesare Pavese‘s most cherished friend. The two met as students, and maintained a frank, intimate and...
22 November (1935): Sherwood Anderson to Miriam Philips
"The idea I did try to express is perhaps sound enough, that the protection we must always seek is that inner laughter...that is to say,...
21 November (1831): Alexander Pushkin to F. N. Glinka
Below, Pushkin reaches out to fellow poet F. N. Glinka, regarding the latter’s failure to take part in a “poetic memorial feast” for Anton Delvig,...
20 November (1950): Edmund Wilson to John Lester
In the letter below, Edmund Wilson writes to John Lester, his former professor, thanking him for his instruction in “the architectonics of prose,” and criticizing...
19 November (1964): Alfred Hitchcock to Vladimir Nabokov
Alfred Hitchcock and Vladimir Nabokov were mutual admirers; for a brief time, they maintained a correspondence, in which they batted around the idea of collaborating...
16, 17 & 18 November (1936): Maxwell Perkins to Thomas Wolfe
On November 13th, 1936, Thomas Wolfe wrote an angry, hurt, agonized-over dispatch to Maxwell Perkins, in which the novelist effectively severed ties with his longtime...
15 November (1974): Charles Bukowski to The L.A. Free Press
Below, Charles Bukowski writes to the editors of The L.A. Free Press, defending a story he had published in their pages two weeks prior. The...
14 November (1973): Patrick White to Cynthia Nolan
Below, Patrick White recounts for friend and fellow novelist Cynthia Nolan a strange, lingering memory from his youth, which was startled awake by a visit...
13 November (1936): Thomas Wolfe to Maxwell E. Perkins, Charles Scribner III
In November of 1936, Thomas Wolfe made the momentous decision to break with Scribner’s, as well as his longtime mentor and editor, Max Perkins....
12 November (1951): Raymond Chandler to Juanita Messick
Below, Raymond Chandler writes to his close personal secretary, Juanita Messick, lamenting the improper use of present participles and the decline of the American mind....
9 November (1921): Conrad Aiken to Maurice Firuski
Below, Conrad Aiken writes to friend Maurice Firuski (the proprietor of a Cambridge, MA bookshop), advising him on how to “escape the worst moment’s of...
8 November (1948): Graham Greene to Elizabeth Bowen
In the spring of 1946, Elizabeth Bowen and V. S. Pritchett convinced Graham Greene to join them in a formal, epistolary discussion on the role...
7 November (1917): Robert Frost to Louis Untermeyer
Below, Robert Frost writes to Louis Untermeyer regarding their mutual friend, Amy Lowell, and the numerous factual errors attending her treatment of Frost in Lowell’s Tendencies...
