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Last to Leave the Field
The Life and Letters of First Sergeant Ambrose Henry Hayward, 28th Pennsylvania Volunteers
Timothy J. Orr
University of Tennessee Press, 2011

Revealing the mind-set of a soldier seared by the horrors of combat even as he kept faith in his cause, Last to Leave the Field showcases the private letters of Ambrose Henry Hayward, a Massachusetts native who served in the 28th Pennsylvania Volunteer Infantry.

Hayward’s service, which began with his enlistment in the summer of 1861 and ended three years later following his mortal wounding at the Battle of Pine Knob in Georgia, took him through a variety of campaigns in both the Eastern and Western theaters of the war. He saw action in five states, participating in the battles of Antietam, Chancellorsville, and Gettysburg as well as in the Chattanooga and Atlanta campaigns. Through his letters to his parents and siblings, we observe the early idealism of the young recruit, and then, as one friend after another died beside him, we witness how the war gradually hardened him. Yet, despite the increasing brutality of what would become America’s costliest conflict, Hayward continually reaffirmed his faith in the Union cause, reenlisting for service late in 1863.

Hayward’s correspondence takes us through many of the war’s most significant developments,
including the collapse of slavery and the enforcement of Union policy toward Southern civilians. Also revealed are Hayward’s feelings about Confederates, his assessments of Union political and military leadership, and his attitudes toward desertion, conscription, forced marches, drilling, fighting, bravery, cowardice, and comradeship.

Ultimately, Hayward’s letters reveal the emotions—occasionally guarded but more often expressed with striking candor—of a soldier who at every battle resolved to be, as one comrade described him, “the first to spring forward and the last to leave the field.”

Timothy J. Orr is an assistant professor of military history at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia.

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The Latin Letters of C.S. Lewis
C.S. Lewis and Don Giovanni Calabria
St. Augustine's Press, 2009

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A Leaf of Voices
Stories of the American Civil War in the Words of Those Who Lived and Died, 1861-65
Jennifer McSpadden
Indiana Historical Society Press, 2014
During the American Civil the Wabash Intelligencer and the Wabash Plain Dealer frequently printed letters from Wabash County men serving in the Union army. The letter writers are a remarkable cast of characters: young and old, soldiers, doctors, ministers, officers, enlisted men, newspaper men, and a fifteen-year-old printers’ devil who enlisted as a drummer boy. These are not stories of generals or battle strategies; they are the stories of the ordinary soldiers and their everyday lives. They describe long tiring marches across state after state, crossing almost impossible terrain, facing shortages of rations and supplies, enduring extremes of weather where they froze one day and sweltered the next, and encountering guerrillas that harried the wagon trains. The correspondents wrote of walking over the bodies of fallen comrades and foes alike, of mules and their wagons sinking into muddy roads that became like quicksand, of shipwrecks, and of former slaves.
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Lee and Jackson's Bloody Twelfth
The Letters of Irby Goodwin Scott, First Lieutenant, Company G, Putnam Light Infantry, Twelfth Georgia Volunteer Infantry
Johnnie Perry Pearson
University of Tennessee Press, 2010

Offering a fascinating look at an ordinary soldier's struggle to survive not only the horrors of combat but also the unrelenting hardship of camp life, Lee and Jackson's Bloody Twelfth brings together for the first time the extant correspondence of Confederate lieutenant Irby Goodwin Scott, who served in the hard-fighting Twelfth Georgia Infantry.

The collection begins with Scott's first letter home from Richmond, Virginia, in June 1861, and ends with his last letter to his father in February 1865. Scott miraculously completed the journey from naïve recruit to hardened veteran while seeing action in many of the Eastern Theater's most important campaigns: the Shenandoah Valley, the Peninsula, Second Manassas, and Gettysburg. His writings brim with vivid descriptions of the men's activities in camp, on the march, and in battle. Particularly revelatory are the details the letters provide about the relationship between Scott and his two African American body servants, whom he wrote about with great affection. And in addition to maps, photographs, and a roster of Scott's unit, the book also features an insightful introduction by editor Johnnie Perry Pearson, who highlights the key themes found throughout the correspondence.

By illuminating in depth how one young Confederate stood up to the physical and emotional duress of war, the book stands as a poignant tribute to the ways in which all ordinary Civil War soldiers, whether fighting for the South or the North, sacrificed, suffered, and endured.

Johnnie Perry Pearson is a retired state service officer formerly with the North Carolina Division of Veteran Affairs. He served as an infantry platoon sergeant during the Vietnam War and lives in Hickory, North Carolina.

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Lee's Last Casualty
The Life and Letters of Sgt. Robert W. Parker, Second Virginia Cavalry
Catherine M. Wright
University of Tennessee Press, 2008
The letters assembled in this extraordinarily rich collection were written by Robert W. Parker, an enlisted Confederate cavalryman who is thought to have been the last man killed in action in the Army of Northern Virginia during the Civil War. He is representative of the Confederate Everyman: a modest farmer in the antebellum years, his patriotic fervor spurred him at the beginning of the war to enlist in the Confederate Army, in which he served until his death during the last charge at Appomattox Court House on April 9, 1865.

Parker fought in most of the major campaigns in Virginia, including the 1862 Valley Campaign, the 1862 Peninsula Campaign, the 1863 Maryland Campaign, and the 1864 Overland Campaign. In letters to his wife Rebecca back home in Bedford County, Virginia, Parker described his life as an enlisted soldier in the Second Regiment Virginia Cavalry. His letters reveal how local communities worked together to provide the necessary stuff of war to soldiers, from food and clothing to moral support. They also show the importance of correspondence and religion in sustaining Confederate morale and nationalism.

Catherine Wright provides a valuable introduction that illuminates not only these particular letters but also the many roles of correspondence during the Civil War. She points out how women-in this case, Parker's wife and his mother-made sure that men in the ranks understood that more than politics or manly honor was at stake in fighting the Yankees. Parker believed that the war was a supreme test in which God would look deep into the souls of Northerners and Southerners. His private beliefs informed his public views on how Southerners should act as citizens of a Confederate nation. People of all classes, Parker reasoned, had to give themselves to country and to God if Southern armies were to succeed on the battlefield. Parker's steadfastness was surely due in part to the words of his family, who instilled in him “just cause” to continue fighting.

Anyone with an interest in how a typical soldier experienced the Civil War will find these letters both absorbing and enlightening.
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Leibniz and the Two Sophies
The Philosophical Correspondence
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Sophie Electress of Hanover, Queen Sophie Charlotte of Prussia
Iter Press, 2011
In his introduction, Lloyd Strickland proposes that Sophie, Electress of Hanover, and her daughter, Queen Sophie Charlotte of Prussia, found consolation in the idea of divine justice. Too long themselves unfairly dismissed as philosophical lightweights, proper justice may now be given to their views through this edition of their private correspondences with Leibniz. Appearing for the first time in English translation, the philosophical selections cover topics from the nature of substance to universal salvation and evidence the independence of the women’s thought as they defend materialism and challenge Leibniz’s conviction that God created the best possible world. The edition also boasts copious and highly informative editorial notes. It is a most welcome addition to The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe: Toronto series.
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Letters
Angelo PolizianoEdited and translated by Shane Butler
Harvard University Press, 2006
Angelo Poliziano (1454-1494) was one of the great scholar-poets of the Italian Renaissance and the leading literary figure of the Age of Lorenzo de' Medici, "il Magnifico." His correspondence gives us an intimate glimpse of the revival of classical literature from the pen of a man at the very center of the Renaissance movement. This volume illuminates his close friendship with the philosopher Pico della Mirandola and includes much of the correspondence concerning the composition and reception of his Miscellanies, a revolutionary work of philology. It also includes his famous and moving letter on the death of Lorenzo de' Medici. This volume contains the first modern edition of the Latin text and the first translation of the letters into English.
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Letters, 121-150
Owen J. Peter Damian
Catholic University of America Press, 2004
No description available
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Letters 1–50
Saint Cyril of Alexandria
Catholic University of America Press, 1987
No description available
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Letters, 151-180
Owen J. Peter Damian
Catholic University of America Press, 2005
No description available
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Letters 91-120
Peter Damian
Catholic University of America Press, 1998
No description available
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The Letters and Journals
Paula Modersohn-Becker
Northwestern University Press, 1998
One of the great modern painters, Paula Modersohn-Becker was also a gifted writer who left behind journals and a sizable correspondence. This edition includes every extant letter, all carefully annotated, and is illustrated with forty-six black-and-white plates.
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Letters and Orations
Cassandra Fedele
University of Chicago Press, 2000
By the end of the fifteenth century, Cassandra Fedele (1465-1558), a learned middle-class woman of Venice, was arguably the most famous woman writer and scholar in Europe. A cultural icon in her own time, she regularly corresponded with the king of France, lords of Milan and Naples, the Borgia pope Alexander VI, and even maintained a ten-year epistolary exchange with Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand of Spain that resulted in an invitation for her to join their court. Fedele's letters reveal the central, mediating role she occupied in a community of scholars otherwise inaccessible to women. Her unique admittance into this community is also highlighted by her presence as the first independent woman writer in Italy to speak publicly and, more importantly, the first to address philosophical, political, and moral issues in her own voice. Her three public orations and almost all of her letters, translated into English, are presented here for the first time.
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Letters and Poems to and from Her Mentor and Other Members of Her Circle
Anna Maria van Schurman
Iter Press, 2021
Anna Maria van Schurman was widely regarded as the most erudite woman in seventeenth-century Europe. As “the Star of Utrecht,” she was active in a network of learning that included the most renowned scholars of her time. Known for her extensive learning and her defense of the education of women, she was the first woman to sit in on lectures at a university in the Netherlands and to advocate that women be admitted into universities. She was proficient in fourteen languages, including Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, Syriac, Aramaic, Persian, Samaritan, and Ethiopian, as well as several vernacular European languages.

This volume presents in translation a remarkable collection of her letters and poems—many of which were previously unpublished—that span almost four decades of her life, from 1631 to 1669.
 
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Letters Familiar and Formal
Arcangela Tarabotti
Iter Press, 2012
Coerced into taking the veil, Venetian writer Arcangela Tarabotti (1604–1652) spent her life protesting the practice of forcing girls into convents. Her fearless defense of women and attacks on patriarchal Venetian society earned her renown and access to the presses. Her publications, however, invited constant controversy. Tarabotti published her Letters Familiar and Formal to protect and enhance her literary reputation while also chronicling contemporary literary society and material existence in an early modern convent. The Letters flaunted Tarabotti’s literary accomplishments, humiliated her critics, and advertised her powerful network of allies in Northern Italy and France. The Letters document how Tarabotti established herself as one of the most forceful proponents for women’s self-determination in early modern Europe.
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Letters from a Young Emigrant in Manitoba
Ronald A. Wells
University of Manitoba Press, 1981

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Letters from Clara
One Intrepid Woman's Travels on the Eve of War, 1936-1939
Janet Newman
Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2022
A unique collection of letters from a member of the YWCA on her first world tour in the 1930s, Letters from Clara tells one woman’s story of adventure and danger on the eve of World War II. Despite limited financial means, Clara Pagel was richly resourceful and used the YWCA network to find work and places to live in the Far East, along the way meeting other women also working their way around the world. As Clara described in letters to her YWCA friends back home, her sojourn was filled with museums and world-famous landmarks, as well as typhoons, bombings, and earthquakes. These experiences are described in over one hundred pages of letters, annotated throughout by Janet Newman. Upon Clara’s return to the United States in 1939, she enrolled at the University of Chicago and earned an MBA at the age of forty-six. This is the story of a remarkable woman on an unexpected but fulfilling journey to learn about the world and herself.
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Letters from Robben Island
A Selection of Ahmed Kathrada's Prison Correspondence, 1964-1989
Robert D. Vassen
Michigan State University Press, 1999

Late one night in July, 1963, a South African police unit surrounded the African National Congress headquarters in Rivonia and arrested a group of Movement leaders gathered inside. Eventually eight of them, including Nelson Mandela, who was already serving a sentence, Walter Sisulu, Dennis Goldberg, Govan Mbeki, Raymond Mhlaba, Elias Motsoledi, Andrew Mangeni, and Ahmed Kathrada, were convicted of sabotage and, on June 12, 1964, sentenced to life in prison. Soon, these men became widely known as the "Rivonia Trialists." Despite their imprisonment, the Trialists played active roles in the struggle against South Africa's racist regime. Instead of being forgotten, as apartheid officials had hoped, they became enduring symbols in a struggle against injustice and racism. 
     Kathrada and his colleagues were classified as high security prisoners, segregated from others and closely watched. Every activity was regulated and monitored. Among the many indignities visited upon them, the prisoners were prohibited from keeping copies of incoming and outgoing correspondence. Kathrada, or "Kathy" as he is known, successfully hid both. 
     Letters From Robben Island contains a selection of 86 of the more than 900 pieces of correspondence Ahmed Kathrada wrote during his 26 years on Robben Island and at Pollsmoor Prison. Some were smuggled out by friends; others were written in code to hide meaning and content from prison censors. These are among his most poignant, touching, and eloquent communications. They are testimonies to Kathrada, his colleagues, and to their commitment to obtaining human dignity and freedom for all South Africans.

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Letters from Spain
A Seventeenth-Century French Noblewoman at the Spanish Royal Court
Marie Gigault de Bellefonds
Iter Press, 2021
Marie Gigault de Bellefonds, Marquise de Villars was a well-regarded figure in Parisian salons and esteemed by King Louis XIV, and she traveled internationally to accompany her ambassador husband, playing significant diplomatic roles at the court of Savoy in Turin and at the court of Spain in Madrid. She became the confidante of the queen of Spain, Marie-Louise d’Orléans, the niece of Louis XIV, and, as instructed by the king of France, endeavored to pursue French political interests in Madrid with female members of royalty.

This volume includes her surviving letters from Madrid to her friend Madame de Coulanges and an appendix of her letters sent from Paris and Turin. The letters from Spain, written between 1679 and 1681, paint a vivid and engaging picture of the royal court and its new queen.
 
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Letters from the Boys
Wisconsin World War I Soldiers Write Home
Carrie A Meyer
Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2018
Words from the Wisconsin boys manning the trenches.

On the 100th anniversary of the arrival of the flood of American troops in Europe that would shift the tide of World War I in favor of the Allies, Letters from the Boys brings to life this terrible war as experienced by Wisconsinites writing home.

Technology had transformed the battlefield in alarming ways. Automatic rifles mowed down the young men who went “over the top” to attack enemy trenches; airplanes and improved artillery brought death unseen from miles away; terrifying clouds of poison gas choked and burned the European countryside; the internal combustion engine brought tanks to the battlefield for the first time and revolutionized the way troops deployed. 

In the thick of it were young men from Wisconsin who found themselves caught up in geopolitical events half a world away. Professor Carrie A. Meyer combed through three newspapers in Green County, Wisconsin, to collect and synthesize the letters from the boys into a narrative that is both unique and representative, telling the stories of several Green County boys and what they saw, from preparing for war, to life among French families near the front, to the terror of the battlefield. Meyer gracefully removes the veil of obscurity and anonymity hanging over soldiers who participated in a war fought so long ago by great numbers of men, reminding us that armies are made of individuals who strove to do their part and then return to their families. 
 
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Letters from the Front, 1898-1945
Michael E. Stevens
Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 1992

This volume tells the stories of 62 men and women from Wisconsin who served in the Spanish-American War, World War I, and World War II. Letters from the Front is a vivid social history of wartime as told by those who took part in these foreign conflicts. Most of them are "ordinary" people, uprooted from farms, factories, and offices, who took part in extraordinary events. This work explores how war changed their lives and reveals the emotions they felt in uniform, in remote outposts, in combat, and in prison camps. These letters, diaries, oral histories, newspapers, and contemporary accounts provide a history of adaptation to military life; they also reflect the changes that occurred over the half-century encompassing these confilcts, an era of great technological innovation — and one in which America's vision of itself also changed.

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Letters from the Queen of Navarre with an Ample Declaration
Jeanne d’Albret
Iter Press, 2016

This edition presents in English, for the first time, Jeanne d’Albret’s Letters to the king, his mother, his brother, her own brother-in-law, and the queen of England, together with her Ample Declaration (1568) defending her decampment to the Protestant stronghold of La Rochelle. A historical-biographical introduction situates these writings in the larger context of Reformation politics and examines in detail the specific literary characteristics of her memoir. In her works, Jeanne d’Albret asserts her own position as legal sovereign of Béarn and Navarre and situates herself at the nexus of overlapping political, religious, and familial tensions.

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Letters from Togo
Susan Blake
University of Iowa Press, 1991
Blake's adventurous essays—her Letters from Togo—are based on the letters she wrote to her friends from Lomé, the West African capital where she spent a Fulbright year teaching American literature from 1983 to 1984. As Blake begins the process of making sense out of a vibrant, seeming anarchy, we are pulled along with her into the heart of Togo—a tiny dry strip of a country no one can even find on a map.

With her delightful prose and insight for detail Blake introduces us to Mahouna, her housekeeper, who runs a cold drink business from his refrigerator in a country where electricity is unreliable; to American Lee Ann and her Togolese family, who works at the American school to earn the fees for a private education for her children; and to the suave René, wearing silk shirts and a most seductive smile, who teeters on the edge of the Togolese and expatriate worlds.

Since Lomé is both an overgrown village and a cosmopolitan city, Blake's exhilarating, often humorous experiences range from buying a car to attending a traditional tom-tom funeral, from visiting people who hunt with bows and arrows to enduring faculty meetings, from negotiating the politics of buying produce to lecturing on Afro-American literature at the English Club. Together, her enlivening letters trace the pattern of adjusting to a foreign environment and probe the connections between Africa and this curious, energetic American. Not "out of Africa" but within it, they take advantage of time and perspective to penetrate the universal experience of being a stranger in a strange land.
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Letters from Wupatki
Courtney Reeder Jones; Edited by Lisa Rappoport
University of Arizona Press, 1995
When David and Courtney Reeder Jones moved into two rooms reached by ladder in a northern Arizona Indian ruin, they had been married only two weeks. Except for the ruin's cement floors, which were originally hardened mud, and skylights instead of smokeholes, the rooms were exactly as they had been 800 years before.

The year was 1938, and the newlyweds had come to Wupatki National Monument as full-time National Park Service caretakers for the ruin. Remote in time and place, their story as described in Courtney's letters will take readers into a dramatic landscape of red rocks, purple volcanoes, and endless blue sky. Here, some 60 years ago, two young people came to terms with their new life together and with their nearly total reliance upon each other and their Navajo neighbors.

"They helped us in any way that a neighbor would, and we helped them as we could," wrote Courtney in her memoirs years later. Vivid and engaging, her letters home spill over with descriptions of their friendship with local Navajo families, their sings and celebrations, and her good luck in being able to be a part of it all.

Letters from Wupatki captures a more innocent era in southwestern archaeology and the history of the National Park Service before the post-war years brought paved roads, expanded park facilities, and ever-increasing crowds of visitors. Courtney's letters to her family and friends reflect all the charm of the earlier time as they convey the sense of rapid transition that came after the war.

Tracking those changes in the development of Wupatki National Monument and the National Park Service, the letters also—and perhaps more important—reveal changes in the Joneses themselves. Of particular interest to anthropologists and historians, their story also gives the general reader captivating glimpses of a partnership between two people who only grew stronger for the struggles they shared together.
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Letters Home to Sarah
The Civil War Letters of Guy C. Taylor, Thirty-Sixth Wisconsin Volunteers
Guy C. Taylor; Edited by Kevin L. Alderson and Patsy Alderson; Introduction by Kathryn Shively Meier
University of Wisconsin Press, 2012
Forgotten for more than a century in an old cardboard box, these are the letters of Guy Carlton Taylor, a farmer who served in the Thirty-Sixth Wisconsin Volunteer Infantry Regiment in the American Civil War. From March 23, 1864, to July 14, 1865, Taylor wrote 165 letters home to his wife Sarah and their son Charley.
    From the initial mustering and training of his regiment at Camp Randall in Wisconsin, through the siege of Petersburg in Virginia, General Lee’s surrender at Appomattox, and the postwar Grand Review of the Armies parade in Washington, D.C., Taylor conveys in vivid detail his own experiences and emotions and shows himself a keen observer of all that is passing around him. While at war, he contracts measles, pneumonia, and malaria, and he writes about the hospitals, treatments, and sanitary conditions that he and his comrades endured during the war. Amidst the descriptions of soldiering, Taylor’s letters to Sarah are threaded with the concerns of a young married couple separated by war but still coping together with childrearing and financial matters. The letters show, too, Taylor’s transformation from a lonely and somewhat disgruntled infantryman to a thoughtful commentator on the greater ideals of the war.
    This remarkable trove of letters, which had been left in the attic of Taylor’s former home in Cashton, Wisconsin, was discovered by local historian Kevin Alderson at a household auction. Recognizing them for the treasure they are, Alderson bought the letters and, aided by his wife Patsy, painstakingly transcribed the letters and researched Taylor’s story in Wisconsin and at historical sites of the Civil War. The Aldersons’ preface and notes are augmented by an introduction by Civil War historian Kathryn Shively Meier, and the book includes photographs, maps, and illustrations related to Guy Taylor’s life and letters.
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Letters of a Dead Man
Prince Hermann von Pückler-Muskau
Harvard University Press
In 1826, the prince of Pückler-Muskau embarked on a tour of England, Wales, and Ireland. Although captivated by all things British, his initial objective was to find a wealthy bride. He and his wife Lucie, having expended every resource on a plan to transform their estate into a vast landscape park, agreed to an amicable divorce, freeing him to forge an advantageous alliance that could rescue their project. For over two years, Pückler’s letters home conveyed a vivid, often quirky, and highly entertaining account of his travels. From the metropolis of London, he toured the mines and factories of the Industrial Revolution and visited the grand estates and spectacular art collections maintained by its beneficiaries. He encountered the scourge of rural and urban poverty and found common cause with the oppressed Irish. With his gift for description, Pückler evokes the spectacular landscapes of Wales, the perils of transportation, and the gentle respite of manor houses and country inns. Part memoir, part travelogue and political commentary, part epistolary novel, Pückler’s rhetorical flare and acute observations provoked the German poet Heinrich Heine to characterize him as the “most fashionable of eccentric men—Diogenes on horseback.”
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The Letters of Alfred Lord Tennyson
Alfred Lord Tennyson
Harvard University Press, 1981

Many years in preparation, this first volume of Lang and Shannon's edition of Tennyson's correspondence lives up to all expectations. In a comprehensive introduction the editors present not only the biographical background, with vivid portrayals of the dramatis personae, but also the story of the manuscripts, the ones that were destroyed and the many that luckily survived.

The Tennyson who emerges in this volume is not a serene or Olympian figure. He is moody, impulsive, often reckless, now full of camaraderie, now plagued by anxiety or resentment, deeply attached to close friends and family and uninterested in the social scene. His early life is unenviable: we see glimpses of the embittered, drunken father, the distraught mother, the swarm of siblings in the rectory at Somersby in Lincolnshire. The happiest period is the three years at Cambridge, terminated when his father dies, and the two years thereafter, with Arthur Hallam engaged to his sister and a frequent visitor at their house. The shock of Hallam's death in 1833, coupled with the savage attack on Tennyson's poems in the Quarterly Review, is followed by depression, bouts of alcoholism, financial problems, and gradually, in the 1840s, increasing recognition of his work. The year 1850 sees the publication of In Memoriam, his long-deferred marriage at age forty to Emily Seliwood, and his acceptance, not without misgivings, of the post of Poet Laureate.

The editors have garnered and selected a large number of letters to and about Tennyson which supplement his own letters, fill in lacunae in the narrative, and reveal him to us as his friends and contemporaries saw him.

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The Letters of Arturo Toscanini
Arturo Toscanini
University of Chicago Press, 2006
Fifty years after his death, Arturo Toscanini is still considered one of the greatest conductors in history, and probably the most influential. His letters, expertly collected, translated, and edited here by Harvey Sachs, will give readers a new depth of insight into his life and work. As Sachs puts it, they “reveal above all else a man whose psychological perceptions in general and self-knowledge in particular were much more acute than most people have thought likely.” They are sure to enthrall anyone interested in learning more about one of the great lives of the twentieth century.

“This is a major contribution to our understanding of Toscanini and of several entire eras of late nineteenth- and twentieth-century musical life, especially the almost improvisatory looseness of opera in Italy, the glamour of European festivals, and the concert life of the United States. It’s also a wonderful, sometimes downright salacious read.”—New York Times

“Toscanini’s large, cranky humanity comes alive throughout his letters, as it does in his best recordings.”—New York Review of Books
 
“Edited with scrupulous care and wide-ranging erudition.”—Wall Street Journal
 
“Sachs has served the conductor well . . . by editing this generously annotated and unprecedentedly revealing collection of letters that were written, usually in haste and often in fury, over the course of seventy years.”—Washington Post

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Letters Of Charles Demuth
Bruce Kellner
Temple University Press, 2000
Charles Demuth is widely recognized as one of the most significant American modernists. His precisionist cityscapes, exquisite flowers, and free-wheeling watercolors of vaudeville performers, homosexual bathhouses, and cabaret scenes hand in many of the country's most prestigious collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Columbus Museum of Art, the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth, the Art Institute of Chicago, and in Demuth's Lancaster, Pennsylvania, family residence, now home of the Demuth Foundation. At a time when many American artists remained tied to Europe, Demuth "Americanized" European modernism.

This  collection of 155 of his letters offers valuable views of the arts and letters colonies in Provincetown, New York, and  Paris. Besides offering information on Demuth's own works, the letters also shed light on the output of his contemporaries, as well as references to their trips, liaisons, and idiosyncrasies. Demuth numbered among his correspondents some of the most famous artists and writers of his time, including Georgia O'Keeffe, Eugene O'Neill, John Reed, Gertrude Stein, Alfred Stieglitz, Carl Van Vechten, and William Carlos Willliams. In his travels in the United States and abroad, he encountered many other  talented contemporaries: Peggy Bacon, Muriel Draper, Marcel Duchamp, the Stetthemer sisters, artists and writers, patrons, and gallery owners. 

Whether he is offering to pick up a copy of Joyce's Ulysses for Eugene O'Neill or trying to convince Georgia O'Keeffe to decorate his music room ("just allow that red and yellow 'canna' one to spread until it fills the room"), Demuth is always in the thick of art and  literary life. Flamboyant in attire but discreet  in his homosexuality, Demuth also reveals in his letters the life of a talented homosexual in the teens and twenties. With his best friends Robert Locher and Marsden Hartley, he circulated through the art colonies of Greenwich Village, Provincetown, and Paris, meeting everyone.

The book also contains reprints of some short appraisals of Demuth and his work that were published during his lifetime, long out of print, including pieces by A. E. Gallatin, Angela E. Hagen, Marsden Hartley, Helen Henderson, Henry McBride, Carl Van Vechten, Rita Wells, and Willard Huntington Wright.
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Letters of Emily Dickinson
Emily Dickinson
Harvard University Press, 1986

Approximately 100 letters are published here for the first time, including almost all of the letters to Jane Humphrey and to Mrs. J. Howard Sweetser. The new material is even more extensive than it might appear, for many of the letters previously published were censored when first made public. This volume, designed to accompany Mr. Johnson’s previously published work, the widely acclaimed Poems of Emily Dickinson, assembles all of Emily Dickinson’s letters (with the exception of letters presumably destroyed). The editors present the letters chronologically, with manuscript location, previous publication data, and notes for each letter, together with a general introduction, and biographical notes on recipients of letters.

The notes for each letter identify persons and events mentioned, and the source of literary allusions and quotations is given wherever known. Since Emily Dickinson rarely dated her letters after 1850, the dates for the most part must be conjectured from careful study of handwriting changes and from internal evidence of the letters. Of the 1,150 letters and prose fragments included in this outstanding edition, the text of about 800 derives from Dickinson autographs.

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The Letters of Franz Liszt to Olga von Meyendorff, 1871–1886
In the Mildred Bliss Collection at Dumbarton Oaks
Franz Liszt
Harvard University Press, 1979

These letters of Franz Liszt are a part of the Dumbarton Oaks Collection bequeathed to Harvard University by Mrs. Robert Woods Bliss in 1969. Written during the last sixteen years of Liszt’s life, they are addressed to the Baroness Olga von Meyendorff, who shared his interests, though not always his views, in a broad field of disciplines—music, philosophy, theology, politics, literature—as well as his concern for persons both prominent and familial.

The translation by William R. Tyler, who from 1969 to 1977 was Director of Dumbarton Oaks, is provided with notes and an Introduction by Edward N. Waters, widely recognized authority on Liszt and formerly Chief of the Music Division of the Library of Congress.

Composed with warmth and humor, and not infrequently with some asperity, the letters reveal Liszt to have been an ardent, generous, and modest man, loyal and devoted to family and friends, pupils and colleagues alike.

Though it was first intended to publish the letters in their original French as well as in translation, the cost of such a publication proved to be prohibitive. However, copies of the letters, or, when necessary, the letters themselves may be consulted by qualified readers at Dumbarton Oaks.

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The Letters of General Richard S. Ewell
Stonewall’s Successor
Donald C. Pfanz
University of Tennessee Press, 2012
“The Letters of General Richard S. Ewell provide a sweeping view of the nineteenth century. Such chronological breadth makes this volume truly exceptional and important. Through Ewell’s eyes we see the many worlds of an American people at war. His thoughtful observations, biting wit, and ironic disposition offer readers a chance to rethink the paper-thin generalizations of Ewell as a quirky neurotic who simply crumbled under the legacy of Stonewall Jackson.” —from the foreword by Peter S. Carmichael

Richard S. Ewell was one of only six lieutenant generals to serve in Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia, and of those he was but one of two—the other being Stonewall Jackson, his predecessor as commander of the Second Corps—to have left behind a sizable body of correspondence. Forty-nine of Ewell’s letters were published in 1939. This new volume, drawing on more recently available material and scrupulously annotated by Ewell biographer Donald Pfanz, offers a much larger collection of the general’s missives: 173 personal letters, 7 official letters, 4 battle narratives, and 2 memoranda of incidents that took place during the Civil War.
    The book covers the full range of Ewell’s career:  his days at West Point, his posting on the western frontier, his role in the Mexican War, his Civil War service, and, finally, his postwar years managing farms in Tennessee and Mississippi. Some historians have judged Ewell harshly, particularly for his failure to capture Cemetery Hill on the first day at Gettysburg, but Pfanz contends that Ewell was in fact a brilliant combat general whose overall record, which included victories at the battles of  Cross Keys, Second Winchester, and Fort Harrison, was one of which any commanding officer could be proud.   Although irritable and often critical of others, Ewell’s correspondence shows him to have been generous toward subordinates, modest regarding his own accomplishments, and upright in both his professional and personal relationships.   His letters to family and friends are a mixture of wry humor and uncommon sense.   No one who reads them will view this important general in quite the same way again.

DONALD C. PFANZ is the author of Richard S. Ewell: A Soldier’s Life, Abraham Lincoln at City Point, and War So Terrible:  A Popular History of the Battle of Fredericksburg.


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Letters of Gustave Courbet
Gustave Courbet
University of Chicago Press, 1992
The French Realist painter Gustave Courbet (1819-77), a
pivotal figure in the emergence of modern painting, remains
an artist whose interests, attitudes, and friendships are
little understood. A voluminous correspondent, Courbet
himself, through his letters, offers a tantalizing avenue
toward a keener assessment of his character and
accomplishments. In her critical edition of over six hundred
of the artist's letters, Petra ten-Doesschate Chu presents
just such a look at the inner life of the artist; her
unparalleled feat of gathering together all of Courbet's
known letters, many heretofore unpublished and untranslated,
is sure to change our evaluation of Courbet's creativity and
of his place in nineteenth-century French life.
Beginning when Courbet left his provincial home at
eighteen and ending eight days before his death in exile in
Switzerland, this correspondence enables readers to follow
the artist's development from youth to mature artist of
international repute. Addressed to correspondents such as
the poet Charles Baudelaire, the painter Claude Monet, the
writers Champfleury, Victor Hugo, and Théeophile Gautier,
the political theorist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, and the
politician Jules Simon, the letters offer numerous insights
into Courbet's life and art as well as the cultural and
political activity of his day. In fascinating detail, they
present the artist's relation to the contemporary media, his
deliberate choice of subject matter for Salon paintings, his
preoccupation with photography, and his participation in the
Commune.

Besides collecting, translating, and annotating the
letters, Chu provides an introduction, a chronology,
biographies of persons appearing frequently in the letters,
and a list of paintings and sculptures mentioned in the
letters. Her work is an essential resource of immediate use
to historians of art and culture, political and social
historians, and readers of biography.

Petra ten-Doesschate Chu is professor and head of the
Department of Art and Music at Seton Hall University.
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The Letters of Gustave Flaubert
Gustave Flaubert
Harvard University Press, 1980

Having been acquitted of the charge of “outrage of public morals and religion” brought against him upon the publication Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert found himself, in 1857, a celebrity and one of the most admired literary men of his day.

Francis Steegmuller’s volume of Flaubert’s letters from the years culminating in that triumph was hailed by the New York Times as “brilliantly edited and annotated…a splendid, intimate account of the development of a writer who changed the nature of the novel.” It went on to garner widespread critical acclaim and to win an American Book Award for Translation.

Now, in the second volume, we see Flaubert in the years of his fame—the years in which he wrote Salammbô, L’Éducation sentimentale, The Temptation of Saint Anthony, Three Tales, and the unfinished Bouvard and Pecuchet. In writing the novels, Flaubert followed his precept, “An author in his book must be like God in the universe, present everywhere and visible nowhere,” but in these letters of his maturity he gives full scope to his feelings and expresses forceful opinions on matters public and private.

We see Flaubert traveling to Tunisia to document the exotic Salammbô, then calling on his own memories and those of his friends to bring to life the Revolution of 1848 and the loves of his hero Frederic Moreau in the pages of L’Éducation sentimentale, which many today consider his greatest novel. Flaubert is taken up by the Second Empire Court of Napoleon III and Eugenie, and becomes a lifelong friend of Princess Mathilde Bonaparte. But the most powerful feminine presence in this volume is the warm, sympathetic George Sand, with whom he maintains a fascinating correspondence for more than ten years. This dialogue on life, letters, and politics between the “two troubadours,” as they called themselves, reveals both of them at their idiosyncratic best.

The deaths of Flaubert’s mother, of his closest friend and mentor, Louis Bouilhet, and of Théophile Gautier, Sainte-Beuve, and other intimates, and Flaubert’s financial ruin at the hands of his beloved niece Caroline and her rapacious husband, make a somber story of the post war years. Despite these and other losses, Flaubert’s last years are brightened by the affection of Guy de Maupassant, Zola, and other younger writers.

Together with Francis Steegmuller’s masterly connecting narrative and essential annotation, these letters, most of which appear here in English for the first time, constitute an intimate and engrossing new biography of the great master of the modern novel.

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The Letters of Gustave Flaubert
Gustave Flaubert
Harvard University Press, 1980

Gustave Flaubert wrote to his mistress, Louise Colet: “An author in his book must be like God in the universe, present everywhere and visible nowhere.” In his books, Flaubert sought to observe that principle; but in his many impassioned letters he allowed his feelings to overflow, revealing himself in all of his human complexity. Sensuous, witty, exalted, ironic, grave, analytical, the letters illustrate the artist’s life—and they trumpet his artistic opinions—in an outpouring of uninhibited eloquence.

An acknowledged master of translation, Francis Steegmuller has given us by far the most generous and varied selection of Flaubert’s letters in English. He presents these with an engrossing narrative that places them in the context of the writer’s life and times. We follow Flaubert through his unhappy years at law school, through his tumultuous affair with Louise Colet; we share his days and nights amid the temples and brothels of Egypt, then on to Palestine, Turkey, Greece, and Rome. And the letters chronicle one of the central events in literary history—the conception and composition of what has been called the first modern novel, Madame Bovary. Steegmuller’s selection concludes with Flaubert’s standing trial for immoral writing, Madame Bovary’s immediate popular success, and Baudelaire’s celebration of its psychological and literary power.

Throughout this exposition in Flaubert’s own words of his views on life, literature, and the passions, readers of his novels will be powerfully reminded of the fertility of his genius, and delighted by his poetic enthusiasm. “Let us sing to Apollo as in ancient days,” he wrote to Louise Colet, “and breathe deeply of the fresh cold air of Parnassus; let us strum our guitars and clash our cymbals and whirl like dervishes in the eternal hubbub of forms and ideas!”

Flaubert’s letters are documents of life and art; lovers of literature and of the literary adventure can rejoice in this edition.

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The Letters of Henry Adams
Henry Adams
Harvard University Press, 1982

Henry Adams’s letters are one of the vital chronicles of the life of the mind in America. A perceptive analyst of people, events, and ideas, Adams recorded, with brilliance and wit, sixty years of enormous change at home and abroad.

Volume I shows him growing from a high-spirited but self-conscious 20-year-old to a self-assured man of the world. In Washington in the chaotic months before Lincoln’s inauguration, then in London during the war years and beyond, he serves as secretary to his statesman father and is privy to the inner workings of politics and diplomacy. English social life proves as absorbing as affairs of state.

Volume II takes him from his years as a crusading journalist in Grant’s Washington, through his marriage to Clover Hooper and his pioneer work as a history professor at Harvard and editor of the North American Review, to his settling in Washington as a professional historian. There he and his wife, described by Henry James as “one of the two most interesting women in America,” establish the first intellectual salon of the capital. This halcyon period comes to a catastrophic close with Clover’s suicide.

Volume III traces his gradual recovery from the shock of his wife’s death as he seeks distraction in travel—to Japan, to Cuba, and in 1891–92 to the South Seas—a recovery complicated by his falling dangerously in love with Elizabeth Cameron, beautiful young wife of a leading senator. His South Seas letters to Mrs. Cameron are the most brilliant of all.

Fewer than half of Adams’s letters have been published even in part, and earlier collections have been marred by expurgations, mistranscriptions, and editorial deletions. In the six volumes of this definitive edition, readers will have access to a major document of the American past.

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The Letters of Henry James
Henry James
Harvard University Press, 1974

Here at last is the first volume of the long-awaited edition of Henry James letters by the world’s foremost Jamesian scholar, Leon Edel.

James was a superlative letter-writer; his correspondence constitutes one of the greatest self-portraits in all literature. In this edition Edel, respecting James’s view that only the best of a writer’s letters deserve publication, skims the cream of the fifteen thousand letters collected or discovered, many by the biographer himself, since the novelist’s death in 1916. In Volume I, the first of four, he provides a General Introduction and a necessary minimum of annotation, and prefaces each section—Boyhood and Youth; Beginnings; The Grand Tour; A Season in Cambridge; Travel and Opportunity; and The Choice—with an informative account of James’s attitudes and activities during the period in question. The volume closes, appropriately, with James’s decision in 1875, at age thirty-two, to move permanently to Europe.

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The Letters of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Harvard University Press, 1966

Volumes III and IV of this edition bring together all the extant letters of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow for the period 1844-1865, most of which have never before been published. These letters carry Longfellow through the remarkable period when he was gaining renown both at home and abroad as the poet laureate of America. His influence swelled with the publication of such works as Evangeline, The Song of Hiawatha, The Courtship of Miles Standish, and Part One of Tales of a Wayside Inn. During these twenty-two years his correspondence proliferated, reaching at least 4000 letters, of which 1500 are known to have survived and are reproduced in these two volumes.

The letters offer further insight not only into the poet's personal life but into his time as well. They document the manifold burdens placed on a popular man of letters, from responding to pleas for advice from unpublished poets to dealing with critical attacks on his own poetry to warding off the importunities of scores of admirers.

The letters further reveal a political interest not hitherto suspected in Longfellow. His exchanges with Senator Charles Sumner shed light on the political dramas of the day, including presidential elections, the Mexican War, the slavery controversy, the founding of the Republican party, and the Civil War. From a social viewpoint, the letters provide an absorbing account of the settled and elegant life of a member of the Boston-Cambridge upper class, into which Longfellow had moved with his marriage to Frances Appleton. They also reveal him as a warm-hearted family man, devoted to his wife and children and solicitous for the welfare of an unhappy brother, a widowed sister, and two wayward nephews.

The letters of Volume III span the publication of five volumes of verse, three anthologies, and a novel. They document the numerous private events that vied with literary production for Longfellow's attention, such as the birth of his six children and the complicated summer migrations to Nahant or Newport. They also follow Longfellow through his resignation from the liaryard professorship in 1854, which was prompted by a desire to devote himself more fully to writing.

Andrew Hilen, who is author of Longfellow and Scandinavia and Professor of English at the University of Washington, has included numerous contemporary photographs to illustrate the letters. His scrupulous annotations supply relevant identifications of individuals, explain allusions, and provide information regarding the addresses of letters, endorsements, postmarks, and the location of manuscripts.

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The Letters of John Greenleaf Whittier
Vols. 1, 2, and 3
John Greenleaf Whittier
Harvard University Press, 1975
These letters of a man deeply concerned about his country, directly involved in political action, and torn, as the Civil War approached, by the conflict between his abolitionist zeal and his Quaker pacifism—letters here collected for the first time and many of them hitherto unpublished—shatter the stereotype of Whittier as “the good gray poet.” The many letters to such figures as John Quincy Adams, Charles Sumner, and William Lloyd Garrison form a detailed record of the abolitionist movement from its inception to its merging with the Free Soil party in the 1850s. The first two volumes reproduce all the extant letters from 1828 to 1860, with full annotations. The last volume is selective, excluding several thousand perfunctory items and including only the historically or biographically interesting letters of the last three decades of the poet's life.
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The Letters of John Keats, 1814-1821
John Keats
Harvard University Press, 1999

For many years one of the most serious needs in the literary world has been for a definitive edition of the letters of Keats. Now one of the world's foremost Keats authorities, Hyder Edward Rollins of Harvard, has prepared a completely new edition of all the extant letters, with an extensive listing of the letters presumed missing.

With impeccable scholarship and total faithfulness to the originals, Professor Rollins here is able to redate and rearrange sixty of the letters. Through full documentation for each letter, understanding of the content is considerably amplified both through the correction of errors, and through application of the results of the editor's life-long study of Keats and his work. In addition to many letters from Keats' relatives and friends, the present work includes seven letters or other documents signed or written by Keats that appear in no English edition, and also new texts of seven other letters by the poet. Furthermore, all the letters known only in Woodhouse's transcripts and in Jeffrey's transcripts are here printed for the first time exactly as Woodhouse and Jeffrey copied them.

The letters of Joseph Severn describing the last illness and death of Keats are given in their entirety. These letters are invaluable historically and biographically, and are also exceptionally good reading.

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The Letters of Machiavelli
Niccolò Machiavelli
University of Chicago Press, 1988
This collection of the most brilliant and characteristic letters of Niccolò Machiavelli displays the vital and penetrating mind of the man who wrote the first work of modern political science. These letters, which reveal Machiavelli's critical intelligence, sense of humor, and elegant sense, are our chief source of information about his personal life. As such, they will serve as a vivid introduction to the personalities and events of the most turbulent period of the Renaissance, and they will also enlighten people who have been fascinated by the political thinker who wrote The Prince and The Discourses on Livy.
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The Letters of Paul Cézanne
Alex Danchev
J. Paul Getty Trust, The, 2013

Book of the Year, Apollo Magazine, 2013

Revered and misunderstood by his peers and lauded by later generations as the father of modern art, Paul Cézanne (1839-1906) has long been a subject of fascination for artists and art lovers, writers, poets, and philosophers. His life was a ceaseless artistic quest, and he channeled much of his wide-ranging intellect and ferocious wit into his letters. Punctuated by exasperated theorizing and philosophical reflection, outbursts of creative ecstasy and melancholic confession, the artist’s correspondence reveals both the heroic and all-toohuman qualities of a man who is indisputably among the pantheon of all-time greats.

This new translation of Cézanne’s letters includes more than twenty that were previously unpublished and reproduces the sketches and caricatures with which Cézanne occasionally illustrated his words. The letters shed light on some of the key artistic relationships of the modern period—about one third of Cézanne’s more than 250 letters are to his boyhood companion Émile Zola, and he communicated extensively with Camille Pissarro and the dealer Ambroise Vollard. The translation is richly annotated with explanatory notes, and, for the first time, the letters are cross-referenced to the current catalogue raisonné. Numerous inaccuracies and archaisms in the previous English edition of the letters are corrected, and many intriguing passages that were unaccountably omitted have been restored. The result is a publishing landmark that ably conveys Cézanne’s intricacy of expression.

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Letters of Peter Abelard, Beyond the Personal
Peter Abelard
Catholic University of America Press, 2008
Comprehensive and learned translation of these texts affords insight into Abelard's thinking over a much longer sweep of time and offers snapshots of the great twelfth-century philosopher and theologian in a variety of contexts.
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The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, 1845-1846
Volume 1, January 1845 to March 1846; Volume 2 March 1846 to September 1846
Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning; edited by Elvan Kintner
Harvard University Press, 1969
THIS EDITION HAS BEEN REPLACED BY A NEWER EDITION.
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The Letters of Robert Frost
Robert Frost
Harvard University Press, 2021

The third installment of Harvard’s five-volume edition of Robert Frost’s correspondence.

The Letters of Robert Frost, Volume 3: 1929–1936 is the latest installment in Harvard’s five-volume edition of the poet’s correspondence. It presents 601 letters, of which 425 are previously uncollected. The critically acclaimed first volume, a Times Literary Supplement Book of the Year, included nearly 300 previously uncollected letters, and the second volume 350 more.

During the period covered here, Robert Frost was close to the height of his powers. If Volume 2 covered the making of Frost as America’s poet, in Volume 3 he is definitively made. These were also, however, years of personal tribulation. The once-tight Frost family broke up as marriage, illness, and work scattered the children across the country. In the case of Frost’s son Carol, both distance and proximity put strains on an already fractious relationship. But the tragedy and emotional crux of this volume is the death of Frost’s youngest daughter, Marjorie. Frost’s correspondence from those dark days is a powerful testament to the difficulty of honoring the responsibilities of a poet’s eminence while coping with the intensity of a parent’s grief.

Volume 3 also sees Frost responding to the crisis of the Great Depression, the onset of the New Deal, and the emergence of totalitarian regimes in Europe, with wit, canny political intelligence, and no little acerbity. All the while, his star continues to rise: he wins a Pulitzer for Collected Poems in 1931 and will win a second for A Further Range, published in 1936, and he is in constant demand as a public speaker at colleges, writers’ workshops, symposia, and dinners. Frost was not just a poet but a poet-teacher; as such, he was instrumental in defining the public functions of poetry in the twentieth century. In the 1930s, Frost lived a life of paradox, as personal tragedy and the tumults of politics interwove with his unprecedented achievements.

Thoroughly annotated and accompanied by a biographical glossary and detailed chronology, these letters illuminate a triumphant and difficult period in the life of a towering literary figure.

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The Letters of Robert Frost
Robert Frost
Harvard University Press, 2016

The Letters of Robert Frost, Volume 2: 1920–1928 is the second installment of Harvard’s five-volume edition of the poet’s correspondence. Nearly three hundred letters in the critically-acclaimed first volume had never before been collected; here, close to four hundred are gathered for the first time. Volume 2 includes letters to some 160 correspondents: family and friends; colleagues, fellow writers, visual artists, editors, and publishers; educators of all kinds; farmers, librarians, and admirers.

In the years covered here, publication of Selected Poems, New Hampshire, and West-Running Brook enhanced Frost’s stature in America and abroad, and the demands of managing his career—as public speaker, poet, and teacher—intensified. A good portion of the correspondence is devoted to Frost’s appointments at the University of Michigan and Amherst College, ​through which he played a major part in staking out the positions poets would later hold in American universities.​​ Other letters show Frost helping to shape the Bread Loaf School of English and its affiliated Writers’ Conference.​ We encounter him discussing his craft with students and fostering the careers of younger poets. His ​​observations (and reservations) about educators are illuminating and remain pertinent. And family life—with all its joys and sorrows, hardships and satisfactions—is never less than central to Frost’s concerns.

Robert Frost was a masterful prose stylist, often brilliant and always engaging.​ Thoroughly annotated and accompanied by a biographical glossary, chronology, and detailed index, these letters are both the record of a remarkable literary life and a unique contribution to American literature.

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The Letters of Robert Frost
Robert Frost
Harvard University Press, 2014

One of the acknowledged giants of twentieth-century American literature, Robert Frost was a public figure much celebrated in his day. Although his poetry reached a wide audience, the private Frost—pensive, mercurial, and often very funny—remains less appreciated. Following upon the publication of Frost’s notebooks and collected prose, The Letters of Robert Frost is the first major edition of the poet’s written correspondence. The hundreds of previously unpublished letters in these annotated volumes deepen our understanding and appreciation of this most complex and subtle of verbal artists.

Volume One traverses the years of Frost’s earliest poems to the acclaimed collections North of Boston and Mountain Interval that cemented his reputation as one of the leading lights of his era. The drama of his personal life—as well as the growth of the audacious mind that produced his poetry—unfolds before us in Frost’s day-to-day missives. These rhetorical performances are at once revealing and tantalizingly evasive about relationships with family and close friends, including the poet Edward Thomas. We listen in as Frost defines himself against contemporaries Ezra Pound and William Butler Yeats, and we witness the evolution of his thoughts about prosody, sound, style, and other aspects of poetic craft.

In its literary interest and sheer display of personality, Frost’s correspondence is on a par with the letters of Emily Dickinson, Robert Lowell, and Samuel Beckett. The Letters of Robert Frost holds hours of pleasurable reading for lovers of Frost and modern American poetry.

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The Letters of the First Duchess of Ormonde
Elizabeth Butler
Iter Press, 2022
This volume is the first to bring together the entire extant correspondence of one of the most significant women in early modern Ireland, Elizabeth Butler, first Duchess of Ormonde. She was the wife of James Butler, twelfth Earl and first Duke of Ormonde, who, as Ireland’s only duke and three times its lord lieutenant, was a figure of considerable importance in seventeenth-century Ireland. But far from being overshadowed by her powerful husband, Butler was a person of significant power and influence in her own right. Descended from the tenth Earl of Ormonde, she brought a hefty portion of the Ormonde estate to the marriage. As Countess, Marchioness, then Duchess of Ormonde, as well as three times vicereine and a high-status courtier, she sat at the pinnacle of Irish and English society, unmatched by any other Irish woman of the period in terms of her wealth, social standing, and power. Her surviving correspondence reveals her importance within the Ormonde-Butler family and in the social, cultural, and political life of seventeenth-century Ireland.

The volume comprises more than three hundred letters written by Ormonde to her husband and family, agents and servants, and friends and clients. Spanning six decades, these letters are meticulously transcribed, edited, and annotated, and the volume includes a substantial scholarly introduction, family trees, a glossary, and other resources.
 
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The Letters of William Lloyd Garrison
William Lloyd Garrison
Harvard University Press, 1971

William Lloyd Garrison (1805-1879), outstanding among the dedicated fighters for the abolition of slavery, was also an activist in other movements such as women's and civil rights and religious reform. Never tiring in battle, he was "irrepressible, uncompromising, and inflammatory." He antagonized many, including some of his fellow reformers. There were also many who loved and respected him. But he was never overlooked.

His letters, a source of the first magnitude, begin in 1822, when Garrison was seventeen, and end in 1879, the year of his death. They offer an insight into the mind and life of an outstanding figure in American history, a reformer-revolutionary who sought radical changes in the institutions of his day--in the relationship of the races, the rights of women, the nature and role of religion and religious institutions, and the relations between the state and its citizens; and who, perhaps more than any other single individual, was ultimately responsible for the emancipation of the slaves.

Garrison's letters are also, sui generis, important as the expression of a vigorous writer, whose letters reflect his strength of character and warm humanity, and who appears here not only as the journalist, the reformer, and the leader of men, but also as the loving husband and father, the devoted son and son-in-law, the staunch friend, and the formidable opponent.

Included in this well illustrated first volume are Garrison's letters from the earliest known--one to his mother during his apprenticeship--through the 1831 founding of his famous newspaper, The Liberator; the founding in 1832 and 1833 of the New England and the American Anti-Slavery Societies; his first trip to England to meet with British abolitionists; his courtship and marriage; and his being dragged through the streets of Boston by a mob out to tar and feather the British abolitionist George Thompson.

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Letters on God and Letters to a Young Woman
Rainer Maria Rilke, Translated from the German by Annemarie S. Kidder
Northwestern University Press, 2012

For Rainer Maria Rilke, letter writing was a discipline and art unto itself. Some seven thousand of his letters have survived, among them works of profound beauty and insight to rival his poems and fiction. For the first time, this volume makes available to an English-speaking audience two of the earliest collections of Rilke letters published after his death, each with a nuanced introduction and notes by Annemarie S. Kidder.

The thematic collection Letters on God contains two letters by Rilke, the first an actual letter written during World War I, in 1915 in Munich, the second a fictional one composed after the war, in 1922 at Muzot in Switzerland. In these letters, Rilke builds on the mystical view of God conceived in The Book of Hours, but he moves beyond it, demonstrating a unique vision of God and Christ, the church and religious experience, friendship and death.

Like his famous Letters to a Young Poet, Rilke’s Letters to a Young Woman presents an intimate series of letters written to a young admirer. The nine letters collected here were written to Lisa Heise over the course of five years, from 1919 to 1924. Though Rilke and Heise never met, the poet emerges in these letters as a compassionate listener and patient teacher who with levelheaded sensitivity affirms and guides the movements of another person’s soul.

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Letters on Natural Philosophy
The Scientific Correspondence of a Sixteenth-Century Pharmacist, with Related Texts
Camilla Erculiani
Iter Press, 2020
In her Letters on Natural Philosophy, published originally in Krakow in 1584, Camilla Erculiani proposed her new theory of the natural causes of the universal flood in the biblical book of Genesis. Erculiani weaves together her understanding of Aristotelian, Platonic, Galenic, and astrological traditions and combines them with her own observations of the world as seen from her apothecary shop in sixteenth-century Padua. This publication brought Erculiani to the attention of the Inquisition, which accused her of heresy, silencing her for centuries.

 This edition presents the first full English translation of Erculiani’s book and other relevant texts, bringing to light the cultural context and scientific thought of this unique natural philosopher.
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Letters to a Fellow Seeker
A Short Introduction to the Quaker Way
Steve Chase
QuakerPress, 2012

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Letters to a Young Poet
Rainer Maria Rilke
Harvard University Press, 2011

In 1902, a nineteen-year-old aspiring poet named Franz Kappus wrote to Rainer Maria Rilke, then twenty-six, seeking advice on his poetry. Kappus, a student at a military academy in Vienna similar to the one Rilke had attended, was about to embark on a career as an officer, for which he had little inclination. Touched by the innocence and forthrightness of the student, Rilke responded to Kappus’ letter and began an intermittent correspondence that would last until 1908.

Letters to a Young Poet collects the ten letters that Rilke wrote to Kappus. A book often encountered in adolescence, it speaks directly to the young. Rilke offers unguarded thoughts on such diverse subjects as creativity, solitude, self-reliance, living with uncertainty, the shallowness of irony, the uselessness of criticism, career choices, sex, love, God, and art. Letters to a Young Poet is, finally, a life manual. Art, Rilke tells the young poet in his final letter to him, is only another way of living.

With the same artistry that marks his widely acclaimed translations of Kafka’s The Castle and Amerika: The Missing Person, Mark Harman captures the lyrical and spiritual dimensions of Rilke’s prose. In his introduction, he provides biographical contexts for the reader and discusses the challenges of translating Rilke. This lovely hardcover edition makes a perfect gift for any young person starting out in life or for those interested in finding a clear articulation of Rilke’s thoughts on life and art.

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Letters to Atticus, Volume I
Cicero
Harvard University Press, 1999

The private correspondence of Rome’s most prolific public figure.

To his dear friend Atticus, Cicero reveals himself as to no other of his correspondents except perhaps his brother. In Cicero's Letters to Atticus we get an intimate look at his motivations and convictions and his reactions to what is happening in Rome. These letters also provide a vivid picture of a momentous period in Roman history, years marked by the rise of Julius Caesar and the downfall of the Republic.

When the correspondence begins in November 68 BC, the 38-year-old Cicero is a notable figure in Rome: a brilliant lawyer and orator, he has achieved primacy at the Roman bar and a political career that would culminate in the consulship in 63. Over the next twenty-four years—until November 44, a year before he was put to death by the forces of Octavian and Mark Antony—Cicero wrote frequently to his friend and confidant, sharing news and views and discussing affairs of business and state. It is to this corpus of over 400 letters that we owe most of our information about Cicero's literary activity. Here too is a revealing picture of the staunch republican's changing attitude toward Caesar. And taken as a whole the letters provide a first-hand account of social and political life in Rome.

D. R. Shackleton Bailey's authoritative edition and translation of the Letters to Atticus is a revised version of his Cambridge Classical Texts and Commentaries edition, with full explanatory notes.

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Letters to Atticus, Volume II
Cicero
Harvard University Press, 1999

The private correspondence of Rome’s most prolific public figure.

To his dear friend Atticus, Cicero reveals himself as to no other of his correspondents except perhaps his brother. In Cicero's Letters to Atticus we get an intimate look at his motivations and convictions and his reactions to what is happening in Rome. These letters also provide a vivid picture of a momentous period in Roman history, years marked by the rise of Julius Caesar and the downfall of the Republic.

When the correspondence begins in November 68 BC, the 38-year-old Cicero is a notable figure in Rome: a brilliant lawyer and orator, he has achieved primacy at the Roman bar and a political career that would culminate in the consulship in 63. Over the next twenty-four years—until November 44, a year before he was put to death by the forces of Octavian and Mark Antony—Cicero wrote frequently to his friend and confidant, sharing news and views and discussing affairs of business and state. It is to this corpus of over 400 letters that we owe most of our information about Cicero's literary activity. Here too is a revealing picture of the staunch republican's changing attitude toward Caesar. And taken as a whole the letters provide a first-hand account of social and political life in Rome.

D. R. Shackleton Bailey's authoritative edition and translation of the Letters to Atticus is a revised version of his Cambridge Classical Texts and Commentaries edition, with full explanatory notes.

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Letters to Atticus, Volume III
Cicero
Harvard University Press, 1999

The private correspondence of Rome’s most prolific public figure.

To his dear friend Atticus, Cicero reveals himself as to no other of his correspondents except perhaps his brother. In Cicero's Letters to Atticus we get an intimate look at his motivations and convictions and his reactions to what is happening in Rome. These letters also provide a vivid picture of a momentous period in Roman history, years marked by the rise of Julius Caesar and the downfall of the Republic.

When the correspondence begins in November 68 BC, the 38-year-old Cicero is a notable figure in Rome: a brilliant lawyer and orator, he has achieved primacy at the Roman bar and a political career that would culminate in the consulship in 63. Over the next twenty-four years—until November 44, a year before he was put to death by the forces of Octavian and Mark Antony—Cicero wrote frequently to his friend and confidant, sharing news and views and discussing affairs of business and state. It is to this corpus of over 400 letters that we owe most of our information about Cicero's literary activity. Here too is a revealing picture of the staunch republican's changing attitude toward Caesar. And taken as a whole the letters provide a first-hand account of social and political life in Rome.

D. R. Shackleton Bailey's authoritative edition and translation of the Letters to Atticus is a revised version of his Cambridge Classical Texts and Commentaries edition, with full explanatory notes.

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Letters to Atticus, Volume IV
Cicero
Harvard University Press, 1999

The private correspondence of Rome’s most prolific public figure.

To his dear friend Atticus, Cicero reveals himself as to no other of his correspondents except perhaps his brother. In Cicero's Letters to Atticus we get an intimate look at his motivations and convictions and his reactions to what is happening in Rome. These letters also provide a vivid picture of a momentous period in Roman history, years marked by the rise of Julius Caesar and the downfall of the Republic.

When the correspondence begins in November 68 BC, the 38-year-old Cicero is a notable figure in Rome: a brilliant lawyer and orator, he has achieved primacy at the Roman bar and a political career that would culminate in the consulship in 63. Over the next twenty-four years—until November 44, a year before he was put to death by the forces of Octavian and Mark Antony—Cicero wrote frequently to his friend and confidant, sharing news and views and discussing affairs of business and state. It is to this corpus of over 400 letters that we owe most of our information about Cicero's literary activity. Here too is a revealing picture of the staunch republican's changing attitude toward Caesar. And taken as a whole the letters provide a first-hand account of social and political life in Rome.

D. R. Shackleton Bailey's authoritative edition and translation of the Letters to Atticus is a revised version of his Cambridge Classical Texts and Commentaries edition, with full explanatory notes.

[more]

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Letters to Francesco Datini
Margherita Datini
Iter Press, 2012
The letters of Margherita Datini to her husband, “the merchant of Prato,” are virtually impossible to put down. Margherita is never obsequious, and never holds her tongue as she chastises Francesco for staying up too late, asks about a case before the Eight of Florence, beseeches him to help friends in prison, worries over financial transactions, and updates him on his business, the harvests, and his illegitimate child (whom she cares for) when he is away. Rich in emotional life and historical particulars, the letters are a unique window into late medieval Tuscany and women’s “work.” Thanks to Carolyn James and Antonio Pagliaro for their illuminating introduction and equally luminous translation.
—Jane Tylus
Professor of Italian Studies and vice provost for academic affairs, New York University
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Letters to Friends
Bartolomeo Fonzio
Harvard University Press, 2011

Bartolomeo Fonzio (1447–1513) was a leading literary figure in Florence during the time of Lorenzo de’ Medici and Machiavelli. A professor of poetry and rhetoric at the University of Florence, he included among his friends and colleagues leading figures such as Marsilio Ficino, Angelo Poliziano, John Argyropoulos, Cristoforo Landino, and Pietro Soderini. He was one of the principal collaborators in creating the famous humanist library of King Mattyas Corvinus of Hungary. As a scholar and teacher, he devoted himself to the study of classical authors, particularly Valerius Flaccus, Livy, Persius and Juvenal; his studies of Juvenal led to bitter polemics with Poliziano.

Fonzio’s letters, translated here for the first time into English, are a window into the world of Renaissance humanism and classical scholarship, and include the famous letter about the discovery in 1485 on the Via Appia of the perfectly preserved body of a Roman girl.

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Letters to Friends, Volume I
Letters 1–113
Cicero
Harvard University Press, 2001

The private correspondence of Rome’s most prolific public figure.

Cicero (Marcus Tullius, 106–43 BC), Roman lawyer, orator, politician and philosopher, of whom we know more than of any other Roman, lived through the stirring era that saw the rise, dictatorship, and death of Julius Caesar in a tottering republic. In his political speeches especially and in his correspondence we see the excitement, tension and intrigue of politics and the part he played in the turmoil of the time. Of about 106 speeches, delivered before the Roman people or the Senate if they were political, before jurors if judicial, fifty-eight survive (a few of them incompletely). In the fourteenth century Petrarch and other Italian humanists discovered manuscripts containing more than 900 letters of which more than 800 were written by Cicero and nearly 100 by others to him. These afford a revelation of the man all the more striking because most were not written for publication. Six rhetorical works survive and another in fragments. Philosophical works include seven extant major compositions and a number of others; and some lost. There is also poetry, some original, some as translations from the Greek.

The Loeb Classical Library edition of Cicero is in twenty-nine volumes.

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Letters to Friends, Volume II
Letters 114–280
Cicero
Harvard University Press, 2001

The private correspondence of Rome’s most prolific public figure.

Cicero (Marcus Tullius, 106–43 BC), Roman lawyer, orator, politician and philosopher, of whom we know more than of any other Roman, lived through the stirring era that saw the rise, dictatorship, and death of Julius Caesar in a tottering republic. In his political speeches especially and in his correspondence we see the excitement, tension and intrigue of politics and the part he played in the turmoil of the time. Of about 106 speeches, delivered before the Roman people or the Senate if they were political, before jurors if judicial, fifty-eight survive (a few of them incompletely). In the fourteenth century Petrarch and other Italian humanists discovered manuscripts containing more than 900 letters of which more than 800 were written by Cicero and nearly 100 by others to him. These afford a revelation of the man all the more striking because most were not written for publication. Six rhetorical works survive and another in fragments. Philosophical works include seven extant major compositions and a number of others; and some lost. There is also poetry, some original, some as translations from the Greek.

The Loeb Classical Library edition of Cicero is in twenty-nine volumes.

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Letters to Friends, Volume III
Letters 281–435
Cicero
Harvard University Press, 2001

The private correspondence of Rome’s most prolific public figure.

Cicero (Marcus Tullius, 106–43 BC), Roman lawyer, orator, politician and philosopher, of whom we know more than of any other Roman, lived through the stirring era that saw the rise, dictatorship, and death of Julius Caesar in a tottering republic. In his political speeches especially and in his correspondence we see the excitement, tension and intrigue of politics and the part he played in the turmoil of the time. Of about 106 speeches, delivered before the Roman people or the Senate if they were political, before jurors if judicial, fifty-eight survive (a few of them incompletely). In the fourteenth century Petrarch and other Italian humanists discovered manuscripts containing more than 900 letters of which more than 800 were written by Cicero and nearly 100 by others to him. These afford a revelation of the man all the more striking because most were not written for publication. Six rhetorical works survive and another in fragments. Philosophical works include seven extant major compositions and a number of others; and some lost. There is also poetry, some original, some as translations from the Greek.

The Loeb Classical Library edition of Cicero is in twenty-nine volumes.

[more]

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Letters to Her Sons, 1447–1470
Alessandra Macinghi Strozzi
Iter Press, 2016

The seventy-three surviving letters written by Florentine widow, Alessandra Macinghi Strozzi (c.1406–1471), to her distant sons first appeared in print well over a century ago, but are here translated into English in their entirety for the first time. Whether for the professional historian or for the general reader interested in Renaissance Florence, they constitute a most precious testimony regarding both private and public life in the mid-fifteenth century, with themes ranging from familial relations, motherhood, marriage, and aspects of material culture to the harsh realities of political exile meted out by the Medici to their perceived opponents, these latter including her husband and, subsequently, her sons.

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Letters to J. D. Salinger
Edited by Chris Kubica and Will Hochman
University of Wisconsin Press, 2014
Despite J. D. Salinger’s many silences—from the publication of The Catcher in the Rye to his absence from the public eye after 1965 to his death in 2010—the unforgettable characters of his novel and short stories continue to speak to generations of readers and writers. Letters to J. D. Salinger includes more than 150 personal letters addressed to Salinger from well-known writers, editors, critics, journalists, and other luminaries, as well as from students, teachers, and readers around the world, some of whom had just discovered Salinger for the first time. Their voices testify to the lasting impression Salinger’s ideas and emotions have made on so many diverse lives.
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Letters to Jargon
The Correspondence between Larry Eigner and Jonathan Williams
Edited and Introduced by Andrew Rippeon
University of Alabama Press, 2019
Gathers some of the most intimate, personal writing on life and the art of poetry by a crucial figure in late twentieth-century American letters
 
Celebrated by both the Black Mountain poets in the 1950s and 1960s and the Language poets in the 1970s and 1980s, Larry Eigner’s poems occupy an important place in American poetry and poetics, and his reputation and legacy grow seemingly stronger with each passing year. Letters to Jargon collects all of the known correspondence between Larry Eigner and Jonathan Williams, the influential publisher of Jargon Society Press and himself a poet.
 
Eigner’s correspondence with Williams began in the early 1950s, as the two were in conversation over the manuscript of On My Eyes, published by Jargon in 1960. Their correspondence continued for many years thereafter, extending into the period when Eigner’s work started to gain recognition from the nascent movement that would become known as “Language” writing.
 
The letters are quite broad in their range of reference and provide a fuller context for Eigner’s poetry and thinking. Eigner and Williams discuss their own poetic practices, including the source material for specific poems, general writing practices, and small press and little magazine publication. This volume offers considerable insight into their shared literary communities as Eigner reports on his readings in contemporary poetry and poetics, as well as his correspondence and contact with other poets including Charles Olson, Vincent Ferrini, Robert Duncan, Denise Levertov, Robert Grenier, and Barrett Watten.
 
Also recorded are Eigner’s reactions to current events and explications of his own poems, including the contexts for appropriated lines and distinctions of character spacing. Eigner also shares with Williams details of his home life, his financial difficulties and the daily challenges of his cerebral palsy. Finally, the book features a series of images of the original letters, enabling readers to see Eigner’s specific material-textual practices.
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Letters to Kennedy
John Kenneth Galbraith
Harvard University Press, 1998

A unique document in the history of the Kennedy years, these letters give us a firsthand look at the working relationship between a president and one of his close advisers, John Kenneth Galbraith. In an early letter, Galbraith mentions his "ambition to be the most reticent adviser in modern political history." But as a respected intellectual and author of the celebrated The Affluent Society, he was not to be positioned so lightly, and his letters are replete with valuable advice about economics, public policy, and the federal bureaucracy. As the United States' ambassador to India from 1961 to 1963, Galbraith made use of his position to counsel the President on foreign policy, especially as it bore on the Asian subcontinent and, ultimately, Vietnam.

Written with verve and wit, his letters were relished by a president who had little patience for foolish ideas or bad prose. They stand out today as a vibrant chronicle of some of the most subtle and critical moments in the days of the Kennedy administration--and a fascinating record of the counsel that Galbraith offered President Kennedy. Ranging from a pithy commentary on Kennedy's speech accepting the 1960 Democratic presidential nomination (and inaugurating the "New Frontier") to reflections on critical matters of state such as the Cuban Missile Crisis and the threat of Communism in Indochina, Letters to Kennedypresents a rare, intimate picture of the lives and minds of a political intellectual and an intellectual politician during a particularly bright moment in American history.

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Letters to Quintus and Brutus. Letter Fragments. Letter to Octavian. Invectives. Handbook of Electioneering
Cicero
Harvard University Press, 2002

Private correspondence and dubious disquisitions.

Cicero had an affectionate relationship with his only brother, Quintus, down to the closing years of their lives. The letters from Cicero to him in this collection offer an intimate look at their world. Cicero’s close friendship with the intensely intellectual Brutus was signalized by Cicero’s dedication of his prized Orator to Brutus. The correspondence between the two collected here dates from the spring and summer of 43 BC, and it conveys some of the drama of the period following the assassination of Julius Caesar.

Shackleton Bailey also provides in this volume a new text and translation of two invective speeches purportedly delivered in the Senate: Sallust attacking Cicero and Cicero attacking Sallust. These are probably anonymous ancient schoolbook exercises, but have come down to us with the works of Sallust and Cicero. Another work in the same category, the Letter to Octavian ostensibly by Cicero but probably dating from the third or fourth century AD, is included as well. Here too (with text by Shackleton Bailey and revised introduction and translation by M. I. Henderson) is the Handbook of Electioneering, a guide said to be written by Quintus to his brother, advising him on campaigning for the consulship of 63 BC. Whether or not this is genuinely the work of Quintus, it remains an interesting treatise on Roman elections. Letter fragments complete the volume; these were not previously available in the Loeb Classical Library.

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Letters to Women
New Letters, volume 2
Theodore Dreiser. Edited by Thomas P. Riggio
University of Illinois Press, 2008

Theodore Dreiser led a long and controversial life, almost always pursuing some serious question, and not rarely pursuing women. This collection, the second volume of Dreiser correspondence to be published by the University of Illinois Press, gathers previously unpublished letters Dreiser wrote to women between 1893 and 1945, many of them showing personal feelings Dreiser revealed nowhere else. Here he both preens and mocks himself, natters and scolds, relates his jaunts with Mencken and his skirmishes with editors and publishers. He admits his worries, bemoans his longings, and self-consciously embarks on love letters that are unafraid to smolder and flame. To one reader he sends “Kisses, Kisses, Kisses, for your sweety mouth” and urges his needy requests: “Write me a love-letter Honey girl.” Alongside such amorous play, he often expressed his deepest feelings on philosophical, religious, and social issues that characterize his public writing.

Chronologically arranged and meticulously edited by Thomas P. Riggio, these letters reveal how wide and deep Dreiser’s needs were. Dreiser often discussed his writing in his letters to women friends, telling them what he wanted to do, where he thought he succeeded and failed, and seeking approval or criticism. By turns seductive, candid, coy, and informative, these letters provide an intimate view of a master writer who knew exactly what he was after.

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Letters, Volume 6 (1*–29*)
Saint Augustine
Catholic University of America Press, 1989
No description available
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Life and Early Travels
Cyriac of Ancona
Harvard University Press, 2015
Cyriac of Ancona (1391–1452) was among the first to study the physical remains of the ancient world in person and for that reason is sometimes regarded as the father of classical archaeology. This volume contains a life of Cyriac to the year 1435 by his friend Francesco Scalamonti, which relies on Cyriac’s own records, along with several letters to and from Cyriac, and other texts illustrating his early life. These include Cyriac’s letter-treatise in praise of Julius Caesar, countering the attacks on the founder of the Roman Empire made by Renaissance republicans. A number of the texts included have been freshly edited and translated for the first time in this volume.
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A Life in Letters
Simone Weil
Harvard University Press, 2024

The inspiring letters of philosopher, mystic, and freedom fighter Simone Weil to her family, presented for the first time in English.

Now in the pantheon of great thinkers, Simone Weil (1909–1943) lived largely in the shadows, searching for her spiritual home while bearing witness to the violence that devastated Europe twice in her brief lifetime. The letters she wrote to her parents and brother from childhood onward chart her intellectual range as well as her itinerancy and ever-shifting preoccupations, revealing the singular personality at the heart of her brilliant essays.

The first complete collection of Weil’s missives to her family, A Life in Letters offers new insight into her personal relationships and experiences. The letters abound with vivid illustrations of a life marked by wisdom as much as seeking. The daughter of a bourgeois Parisian Jewish family, Weil was a troublemaking idealist who preferred the company of miners and Russian exiles to that of her peers. An extraordinary scholar of history and politics, she ultimately found a home in Christian mysticism. Weil paired teaching with poetry and even dabbled in mathematics, as evidenced by her correspondence with her brother, André, who won the Kyoto Prize in 1994 for the famed Weil Conjectures.

A Life in Letters depicts Simone Weil’s thought taking shape amid political turmoil, as she describes her participation in the Spanish struggle against fascism and in the transatlantic resistance to the Nazis. An introduction and notes by Robert Chenavier contextualize the letters historically and intellectually, relating Weil’s letters to her general body of writing. This book is an ideal entryway into Weil’s philosophical insights, one for both neophytes and acolytes to treasure.

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A Life in Letters, 1914–1982
Gershom Scholem
Harvard University Press, 2002

Perhaps the greatest scholar of Jewish mysticism in the twentieth century, Gershom Scholem (1897–1982) once said of himself, “I have no biography, only a bibliography.” Yet, in thousands of letters written over his lifetime, his biography does unfold, inscribing a life that epitomized the intellectual ferment and political drama of an era. This selection of the best and most representative letters—drawn from the 3000 page German edition—gives readers an intimate view of this remarkable man, from his troubled family life in Germany to his emergence as one of the leading lights of Israel during its founding and formative years.

In the letters, we witness the travails and vicissitudes of the Scholem family, a drama in which Gershom is banished by his father for his anti-kaiser Zionist sentiments; his antiwar, socialist brother is hounded and murdered; and his mother and remaining brothers are forced to emigrate. We see Scholem’s friendships with some of the most intriguing intellectuals of the twentieth century—such as Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor Adorno—blossom and, on occasion, wither. And we learn firsthand about his Zionist commitment and his scholarly career, from his move to Palestine in the 1920s to his work as Professor of Jewish Mysticism at the Hebrew University. Over the course of seven decades that comprised the most significant events of the twentieth century, these letters reveal how Scholem’s scholarship is informed by the experiences he so eloquently described.

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Like Grass before the Scythe
The Life and Death of Sgt. William Remmel 121st New York Infantry
William Remmel
University of Alabama Press, 2007
Uncommonly articulate letters from a young German-American soldier with the Union forces
 
Sergeant William Remmel was a German immigrant who had settled with his parents and family in far upstate New York. His letters collected in Like Grass before the Scythe cover more than two full years of his service and provide details on military and social history in the eastern theater of operations and on the experience of the home front in upstate New York among a largely immigrant, working-class family and community.
 
Remmel wrote in English and apparently his parents responded in German. In addition to the important material on an immigrant family’s experience, Remmel also deals with the question of slavery, illness and hospital care (when he was wounded), the problem of hard war/total war, as well as the campaigns of Chancellorsville, Gettysburg, and the Shenandoah Valley in 1864.
 
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The Lincoln Mailbag
America Writes to the President, 1861-1865
Edited by Harold Holzer
Southern Illinois University Press, 2006

As president, Abraham Lincoln received between two hundred and five hundred letters a day—correspondence from public officials, political allies, and military leaders, as well as letters from ordinary Americans of all races who wanted to share their views with him. Here, and in his critically acclaimed volume Dear Mr. Lincoln, editor Harold Holzer has rescued these voices—sometimes eloquent, occasionally angry, at times poetic—from the obscurity of the archives of the Civil War. The Lincoln Mailbag includes letters written by African Americans, which Lincoln never saw, revealing to readers a more accurate representation of the nation’s mood than even the president knew. This first paperback edition of The Lincoln Mailbag includes a new index and fourteen illustrations, and Holzer’s introduction and annotations provide historical context for the events described and the people who wrote so passionately to their president in Lincoln's America.

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The Lisle Letters
Edited by Muriel St. Clare Byrne
University of Chicago Press, 1981
The Lisle Letters consist of the personal, official, and business correspondence of the household of Arthur Plantagenet, Viscount Lisle, the illegitimate but acknowledged son of Edward IV, during the years 1533 to 1540 when he was Lord Deputy of Calais. These seven critical years in English history were marked by the rise, ascendency, and fall of Thomas Cromwell and the letters reflect the mixture of passion, terror, and politics that was the court of Henry VIII. They also present the everyday concerns of the Lisle household. No other source provides such an abundance of detail about daily life - marriage, child rearing, education, clothing, food, and furnishing. The Lisle Letters are the Tudor world in microcosm.
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The Lisle Letters
An Abridgement
Edited by Muriel St. Clare Byrne
University of Chicago Press, 1983
In a one-volume abridgement, these sixteenth-century letters paint a magnificent portrait of family life amidst the intrigue, terror, and politics of the court of Henry VIII. The culmination of Lord Lisle's imprisonment in the Tower of London.
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The Long Voyage
Selected Letters of Malcolm Cowley, 1915-1987
Malcolm Cowley
Harvard University Press, 2014

Critic, poet, editor, chronicler of the “lost generation,” and elder statesman of the Republic of Letters, Malcolm Cowley (1898–1989) was an eloquent witness to much of twentieth-century American literary and political life. These letters, the vast majority previously unpublished, provide an indelible self-portrait of Cowley and his time, and make possible a full appreciation of his long and varied career.

Perhaps no other writer aided the careers of so many poets and novelists. Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Kerouac, Tillie Olsen, and John Cheever are among the many authors Cowley knew and whose work he supported. A poet himself, Cowley enjoyed the company of writers and knew how to encourage, entertain, and when necessary scold them. At the center of his epistolary life were his friendships with Kenneth Burke, Allen Tate, Conrad Aiken, and Edmund Wilson. By turns serious and thoughtful, humorous and gossipy, Cowley’s letters to these and other correspondents display his keen literary judgment and ability to navigate the world of publishing.

The letters also illuminate Cowley’s reluctance to speak out against Stalin and the Moscow Trials when he was on staff at The New Republic—and the consequences of his agonized evasions. His radical past would continue to haunt him into the Cold War era, as he became caught up in the notorious “Lowell Affair” and was summoned to testify in the Alger Hiss trials.

Hans Bak supplies helpful notes and a preface that assesses Cowley’s career, and Robert Cowley contributes a moving foreword about his father.

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Lord Byron
Selected Letters and Journals
George Gordon Byron
Harvard University Press, 1982

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Lost in Transition
Removing, Resettling, and Renewing Appalachia
Aaron D. Purcell
University of Tennessee Press, 2021

In Lost in Transition: Removing, Resettling, and Renewing Appalachia, Aaron D. Purcell presents a thematic and chronological exploration of twentieth-century removal and resettlement projects across southern Appalachia. The book shares complex stories of loss and recollection that have grown and evolved over time.

This edited volume contains seven case studies of public land removal actions in Virginia, Kentucky, the Carolinas, and Tennessee from the 1930s through the 1960s. Some of the removals include the Tennessee Valley Authority and the Norris Basin, Shenandoah National Park and the New River, the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, and the Keowee-Toxaway Project in northwestern South Carolina. Each essay asks key questions: How did governmental entities throughout the twentieth century deal with land acquisition and removal of families and communities? What do the oral histories of the families and communities, particularly from different generations, tell us about the legacies of these removals? This collection reveals confrontations between past and present, federal agencies and citizens, and the original accounts of removal and resettlement and contemporary interpretations. The result is a blending of practical historical concerns with contemporary nostalgia and romanticism, which often deepen the complexity of Appalachian cultural life.

Lost in Transition provides a nuanced and insightful study of removal and resettlement projects that applies critical analysis of fact, mythology, and storytelling. It illustrates the important role of place in southern Appalachian history. This collection is a helpful resource to anthropologists, folklorists, and Appalachian studies scholars, and a powerful volume of stories for all readers who reflect upon the importance of place and home.

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Love amid the Turmoil
The Civil War Letters of William and Mary Vermilion
Donald C. Elder, III
University of Iowa Press, 2003

William Vermilion (1830-1894) served as a captain in Company F of the 36th Iowa Infantry from October 1862 until September 1865. Although he was a physician in Iconium in south central Iowa at the start of the war, after it ended he became a noted lawyer in nearby Centerville; he was also a state senator from 1869 to 1872. Mary Vermilion (1831-1883) was a schoolteacher who grew up in Indiana; she and William married in 1858. In this volume historian Donald Elder provides a careful selection from the hundreds of supportive, informative, and heart-wrenching letters that they wrote each other during the war—the most complete collection of letters exchanged between a husband and a wife during the Civil War.

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Love and Power in the Nineteenth Century
The Marriage of Violet Blair
Virginia Jeans Laas
University of Arkansas Press, 1998

Winner, 1999 Missouri Conference on History Book Award

This fascinating biography of a marriage in the Gilded Age closely examines the dynamic flow of power, control, and love between Washington blue blood Violet Blair and New Orleans attorney Albert Janin. Based on their voluminous correspondence as well as Violet’s extensive diaries, it offers a thoroughly intimate portrait of a fifty-four-year union which, in many ways, conformed to societal strictures, yet always created its own definition of itself in order to fit the flux of needs of both husband and wife.

Central to their story is Violet’s fierce determination to maintain her autonomy within the patriarchic institution of marriage. An enduring belle who thought, talked, and acted with the assurance and self-confidence of one whose wishes demanded obedience, she rejected the Victorian ideal of women as silent, submissive consorts. Yet her feminism was a private one, not played out on a public stage but kept to the confines of her own daily life and marriage.

With abundant documentary evidence to draw upon, Laas ties this compelling story to broader themes of courtiship behavior, domesticity, gender roles, extended family bonds, elitism, and societal stereotyping. Deeply researched and beautifully written, Love and Power in the Nineteenth Century has the dual virtue of making an important historical contribution while also appealing to a broad popular audience.

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Love, H
The Letters of Helene Dorn and Hettie Jones
Hettie Jones
Duke University Press, 2016
"It works, we're in business, yeah Babe!" So begins this remarkable selection from a forty-year correspondence between two artists who survived their time as wives in the Beat bohemia of the 1960s and went on to successful artistic careers of their own.
 
From their first meeting in 1960, writer Hettie Jones—then married to LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka)—and painter and sculptor Helene Dorn (1927–2004), wife of poet Ed Dorn, found in each other more than friendship. They were each other's confidant, emotional support, and unflagging partner through difficulties, defeats, and victories, from surviving divorce and struggling as single mothers, to finding artistic success in their own right. 
 
Revealing the intimacy of lifelong friends, these letters tell two stories from the shared point of view of women who refused to go along with society’s expectations. Jones frames her and Helene's story, adding details and explanations while filling in gaps in the narrative. As she writes, "we'd fled the norm for women then, because to live it would have been a kind of death."
 
Apart from these two personal stories, there are, as well, reports from the battlegrounds of women's rights and tenant's rights, reflections on marriage and motherhood, and contemplation of the past to which these two had remained irrevocably connected. Prominent figures such as Allen Ginsberg and Timothy Leary appear as well, making Love, H an important addition to literature on the Beats. 
 
Above all, this book is a record of the changing lives of women artists as the twentieth century became the twenty-first, and what it has meant for women considering such a life today. It's worth a try, Jones and Dorn show us, offering their lives as proof that it can be done.
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