16 January (1981): James Dickey to Christopher Dickey
When you come out of this, a legend will come with you: the legend of what you write, which will be also what you have...
15 January (1936): Sherwood Anderson to Jasper Deeter
You know, Jap, he went in for a kind of super-realism. The imaginative world, as I understood it, was to be more or less chucked...
14 January (1856): Henrik Ibsen to Susanna Thoresen
And the ladies smile demurely
As memory’s album receives
Speeches, fiery and tender,
Not speakers nor hearer believes.
13 January (1921): Eugene O’Neill to John V. A. Weaver
At any rate, the results of my last two relaxings have been so venomous that I have taken the holy New Year oath to remain...
12 January (1940): Henry Miller to Anaïs Nin
Not only does one feel integrated, harmonious, at one with all life, but—one is silenced. That is perhaps the highest experience I know of. It...
9 January (1996): Saul Bellow to Albert Glotzer
He’s getting ready to publish a collection of recently released Lenin documents from the early years—1917 to 1923. I wish you had been here when...
8 January (1954): Joy Davidman to William Lindsay Gresham
I got talking with Bill Temple and another guy, and what do you suppose they were gnashing their teeth about? The awfulness of being a...
7 January (1942): Eudora Welty to Diarmuid Russell
There is a maniac here (really a surgeon) with a yard full of bushes which he erects canvas tents over and heats all night by...
6 January (1935): Bertolt Brecht to Bernard von Brentano
I share your doubts as to the validity of opinions professed by persons who without said opinions would suffer material loss. But you will agree...
5 January (1953): Sylvia Plath to Aurelia and Otto Plath
BRINGING FABULOUS FRACTURED FIBULA NO PAIN JUST TRICKY TO MANIPULATE WHILE CHARLESTONING. ANYTHING TO PROLONG VACATION.
2 January (1941): Edna St. Vincent Millay to Charlotte Babcock Sills
You see by the dates on the poems in this book that they were written in a furious haste and published as soon as they...
1 January (1842): Søren Kierkegaard to Emil Boesen
If you have anything to say, please write, for you are and always will remain the only person who has a seat and a vote...
11 November (1955): James Schuyler to Fairfield Porter
All I mean is that it seems to me merely another instance of American self-consciousness when confronted by one’s oddness, when the oddness is what...
3 November (1936): Lawrence Durrell to Henry Miller
The great shock is to find himself alone in life—with no contact—not even with that sweet but silly little wretch Ophelia. Horatio a heart-of-oak dumbbell....
31 October (1845): Mary Shelley to Thomas Hookham
The poets you talk of are mere copies of course...
29 October (1927): Sherwood Anderson to Gertrude Stein
...I had always made my living by writing advertisements. Hated to go back to that but had made up my mind to do it. Then...
28 October (1872): Friedrich Nietzsche to His Mother
Below, Nietzsche pens an energetic—and, perhaps, uncharacteristically mirthful—dispatch to his mother, Franziska Oehler. The letter was, in part, compensatory, as Nietzsche himself was supposed to...
27 October (1957): Flannery O’Connor to Cecil Dawkins
One of these days I’ll send you one of me and two of my friends but my friends are not very cooperative about having their...
24 October (1956): Robert Lowell to Elizabeth Bishop
"I’ve shot my wad. Bear up, my dear, and come back to us. Elizabeth is grand, enormous, lovely and sends you her love, and I...
22 October (1939): Kenneth Patchen to James Laughlin
Below, poet Kenneth Patchen responds to New Directions Press founder James Laughlin’s frenzied, combative, and actually-kind-of-funny dispatch (which we published here on Monday) regarding the...
21 October (1913): Rainer Maria Rilke to Marie von Thurn und Taxis
And yet I would so much like the ‘Unknown Lady’ to speak to me…
20 October (1939): James Laughlin to Kenneth Patchen
"Now WHAT IS THE TROUBLE? I can't dope it out. Are you eating the orders? Are you using them to paper the walls of your...
17 October (1844): Honoré de Balzac to Ewelina Hańska
Below, Balzac writes to longtime mistress Ewelina Hańska from his sick bed in Paris. Suffering from a crippling attack of “cerebral neuralgia,” Balzac variously instructs, exalts,...
16 October (1958): Alice B. Toklas to Harold and Virginia Knapik
"Last evening glorious red sky—this morning covered—it is trying to rain now. They merely say it is autumn. Today is the fête of the raisin...
