4 August (1964): Thomas Merton to Daniel Berrigan
With this spiritual nosegay I declare myself your happy and insouciant Kentucky friend, and nowonder Henry Miller says I look like an ex-con and like...
1 August (1952): James Thurber to Katherine Angell
Do you remember when we all we worried about was love?
31 July (1945): Allen Ginsberg to Jack Kerouac
To the gentle children and the sons of wrath, to those with flowers in their eyes, of sorrow or of sickness, a tender adieu.
30 July (1845): Emily Brontë to Ellen Nussey
I must hurry off now to my taming and ironing I have plenty of work on hands and writing and am altogether full of business...
29 July (1971): E.B. White to William Maxwell
My birds are shedding now, and I’m enclosing two feathers from the young gander; you can make them into pens for Kate and Brookie so...
28 July (1949): John Steinbeck to Elaine Scott
I am going to make my world-shaking macaroni for dinner and the kids are wild with joy because it means there will be tomato sauce...
25 July (1909): Rupert Brooke to Noël Olivier
But when one, beginning to bathe, throws off one’s two garments, — then all is surprisingly well. You no longer feel disliked, an outsider. (It’s...
24 July (1950): Kenneth Rexroth to James Laughlin
It is these activities which have made contemporary poetry in bulk what it is, scared, bled out, punch drunk and synthetic...
23 July (1923): P.G. Wodehouse to William Townend
Error, I think, ever to have your villain manhandled by a minor character. Just imagine Doctor Moriarty punched by Watson...
22 July (1963): William Maxwell to Eudora Welty
Emmy shook her head in wonder at it, and Mr. [William] Shawn stopped me in the hall to ask if I had talked to you...
21 July (1952): Kurt Vonnegut to Knox Burger
I guess the jacket is pretty dead. I was on it originally, but was taken off because the green made me look like death warmed...
18 July (1937): Thornton Wilder to Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas
And in answer to Paul Valery’s question as to how the masterpieces of the future will be paid for in an age when there are...
17 July (1950): Graham Greene to Evelyn Waugh
I can’t think of anyone in England who would have the faintest idea what Brideshead is about.
16 July (1955): Anne Morrow Lindbergh to Constance Morgan
Most doctors try to dynamite all the bridges between the unconscious and the conscious because they are afraid of the unconscious (shock treatment, drugs, etc.)....
15 July (1878): Friedrich Nietzsche to Mathilde Maier
Now I have shaken off what is extraneous to me: people, friends and enemies, habits, comforts, books; I live in solitude—years of it, if needs...
14 July (1943): Harold Nicolson to Vita Sackville-West
I suppose that the fact that I got into the Government (and in a post where I ought to have made good) and was thereafter...
11 July (1927): Mark Van Doren to Charles Erskine Scott Wood and Sara Field
Indeed a life lived altogether for me and mine, and all saved up and centered on three things: Dorothy, Charlie, and the sawmill house. The...
10 July (1928): Zora Neale Hurston to Langston Hughes
Without flattery, Langston, you are the brains of this argosy. All the ideas have come out of your head...
9 July (1958): Robert Duncan to Denise Levertov
Weeping (treacherously) I said when he askd what was the matter—“I’m so selfish it hurts” and felt, as if there were reason or vindication there,...
8 July (1913): Walter Benjamin to Carla Seligson
All around us we see those who once suffered the same thing and saved themselves by taking refuge in coldness and superiority. It is not...
7 July (1937): Jake Zeitlin to Frieda Lawrence
I think it would be better, for Lawrence’s sake, for them to remain if the collection is sold intact. Would you consider changing your original...
4 July (1950): Italo Calvino to Mario Motta
Now I believe that this is a modern man’s achievement (or rather the achievement for which he should strive): to shed the myth of a...
3 July (1959): Jessica Mitford to Barbara and Ephraim Kahn
Life here is even-keelish to say the least. It’s the sort of hotel where Fr. bourgeois gentility reigns supreme...
2 July (1844): Edgar Allan Poe to James Russell Lowell
I, now and then feel stirred up to excel a fool, merely because I hate to let a fool imagine that he may excel me....
