front cover of Papers of John Adams
Papers of John Adams
Edited by Gregg L. Lint, Sara Martin, C. James Taylor, Sara Georgini, Hobson Woodward, Sara B. Sikes, Amanda M. Norton
Harvard University Press, 2016

Volume 18 is the final volume of the Papers of John Adams wholly devoted to Adams’ diplomatic career. It chronicles fourteen months of his tenure as minister to Great Britain and his joint commission, with Thomas Jefferson, to negotiate treaties with Europe and North Africa. With respect to Britain, Adams found it impossible to do “any Thing Satisfactory, with this Nation,” and the volume ends with his decision to resign his posts. His diplomatic efforts, Adams thought, were too much akin to “making brick without straw.”

John Adams’ ministerial efforts in London were disappointing, but other aspects of his life were not. He and Jefferson failed to finalize treaties with Portugal and Great Britain, but they did, through agent Thomas Barclay, conclude a treaty with Morocco. Barclay’s letters are the earliest and most evocative American accounts of that region. Adams witnessed the marriage of his daughter, Abigail 2d, to William Stephens Smith, promoted the ordination of American Episcopal bishops, and toured the English countryside, first with Thomas Jefferson and then with his family. Most significant perhaps was the publication of the first volume of Adams’ Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America. This work is often attributed to concern over Shays’ Rebellion, of which Adams knew little when he began drafting. In fact, it was Adams’ summer 1786 visit to the Netherlands that provoked his work. There, Dutch Patriot friends, involved in their own revolution, expressed interest in seeing “upon paper” his remarks “respecting Government.”

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Papers of John Adams
Edited by Gregg L. Lint, Margaret A. Hogan, C. James Taylor, Anne Decker Cecere, Richard Alan Ryerson, Jennifer Shea, and Celeste Walker
Harvard University Press, 1977

In mid-March 1781, John Adams received his commission and instructions as minister to the Netherlands and embarked on the boldest initiative of his diplomatic career. Disappointed by the lack of interest shown by Dutch investors in his efforts to raise a loan for the United States, Adams changed his tactics, and in a memorial made a forthright appeal to the States General of the Netherlands for immediate recognition of the United States. Published in Dutch, English, and French, it offered all of Europe a radical vision of the ordinary citizen’s role in determining political events. In this volume, for the first time, the circumstances and reasoning behind Adams’s bold moves in the spring of 1781 are presented in full.

In July the French court summoned Adams, the only American in Europe empowered to negotiate an Anglo–American peace, to Paris for consultations regarding an offer made by Austria and Russia to mediate the Anglo–French war. In his correspondence with France’s foreign minister, the Comte de Vergennes, Adams passionately insisted that the United States was fully and unambiguously independent and sovereign and must be recognized as such by Great Britain before any negotiations took place. This volume shows John Adams to be a determined and resourceful diplomat, unafraid to go beyond the bounds of traditional diplomacy to implement his vision of American foreign policy.

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Papers of John Adams
John Adams
Harvard University Press, 1977

No family in three generations has contributed so much to American history as the Adamses. John Adams, John Quincy Adams, and Charles Francis Adams, despite periods of doubt, knew that history, if not their contemporaries, would recognize their accomplishments. When the Adams Papers series is complete, the writings of these three statesmen will have been examined thoroughly.

Aside from the Legal Papers of John Adams, published in 1965, these two volumes are the first in Series III: General Correspondence and Other Papers of the Adams Statesmen. Volumes 1 and 2 of the Papers of John Adams include letters to and from friends and colleagues, reports of committees on which he served, his polemical writings, published and unpublished, and state papers to which he made a contribution.

All of Adams’s newspaper writings, including “A Dissertation on the Canon and the Feudal Law,” are in these two volumes. In addition to being a condemnation of the Stamp Act, the “Dissertation” is shown to be one of the building blocks of the theory of a commonwealth of independent states under the king, which reaches complete statement in the Novanglus letters. For the first time, all thirteen of these letters appear in full with annotation.

The period September 1755 to April 1775 covers Adams’s public service in Braintree and Boston town meetings, the Massachusetts House of Representatives, the First Continental Congress, and the First Provincial Congress of Massachusetts. During this time his political future was being shaped by circumstances not always of his choosing. He hesitated at first at the threshold of a public career, political ambition in conflict with concern for his family’s well-being. But as the confrontation with Great Britain sharpened, the crisis became acute; no choice remained. For Adams there was no shirking the path of duty.

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Papers of John Adams
John Adams
Harvard University Press, 1977

On the last day of December 1780, John Adams wrote that he had just spent “the most anxious and mortifying Year of my whole Life.” He had resided first at Paris, then at Amsterdam, attempting, without success, to open Anglo–American peace negotiations and to raise a Dutch loan. In volumes 9 and 10 of the Papers of John Adams, over 600 letters and documents that Adams sent to and received from numerous correspondents in Europe and America provide an unparalleled view of Adams’s diplomacy and a wealth of detail on the world in which he lived.

These volumes chronicle Adams’s efforts to convince the British people and their leaders that Britain’s economic survival demanded an immediate peace; his “snarling growling” debate with the French foreign minister, the Comte de Vergennes, over the proper Franco–American relationship; and his struggle to obtain a loan in the Netherlands, where policies were dictated by Mammon rather than republican virtue. Adams’s writings, diplomatic dispatches, and personal correspondence all make clear the scope of his intelligence gathering and his propaganda efforts in the British, French, and Dutch press. The letters reflect his interest in Bordeaux wines, the fate of Massachusetts Constitution that he had drafted in 1779, and political developments in Philadelphia, Boston, London, and St. Petersburg. The volumes leave no doubt as to John Adams’s unwavering commitment to the American cause. Even in this most difficult year, he believed the revolution in America to be “the greatest that ever took Place among Men.” He felt honored to serve a new nation where “the Wisdom and not the Man is attended to,” whose citizens were fighting a “People’s War” from which the United States would inevitably emerge victorious to take its rightful place on the world stage.

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Papers of John Adams
Edited by Gregg L. Lint, Margaret A. Hogan, C. James Taylor, Anne Decker Cecere, Richard Alan Ryerson, Jennifer Shea, and Celeste Walker
Harvard University Press, 1977

The American victory at Yorktown in October 1781 and the fall of Lord North’s ministry in March 1782 opened the possibility that John Adams might soon be involved in negotiations to end the war for American independence. To prepare for the occasion, Adams and Benjamin Franklin discussed in their letters the fundamentals for peace. Adams made it clear to the British government that there would be no negotiations without British recognition of the United States as independent and sovereign.

This volume chronicles Adams’s efforts, against great odds, to achieve formal recognition of the new United States. The documents include his vigorous response to criticism of his seemingly unorthodox methods by those who would have preferred that he pursue a different course, including Congress’s newly appointed secretary for foreign affairs, Robert R. Livingston.

In April 1782 the Netherlands recognized the United States and admitted John Adams as its minister. For Adams it was “the most Signal Epocha, in the History of a Century,” and he would forever see it as the foremost achievement of his diplomatic career. The volume ends with Adams, at long last a full-fledged member of the diplomatic corps, describing his reception by the States General and his audiences with the Prince and Princess of Orange.

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Papers of John Adams
John Adams
Harvard University Press, 1977

“Once more after an Interruption of ten Years, I pronounce myself a happy Man, and pray Heaven to continue me so.” Thus wrote John Adams in late August 1784 after the arrival in Europe of his wife Abigail and daughter Nabby. Adams and his family were living together in the pleasant Paris suburb of Auteuil. There Adams, with Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, formed a joint commission to conclude commercial treaties with the nations of Europe and North Africa. For the first time since he had left America in 1778 on his first diplomatic mission, Adams was no longer engaged in “militia diplomacy.”

Volume 16 of the Papers of John Adams chronicles fourteen months of Adams’ diplomatic career. As minister to the Netherlands he raised a new Dutch loan to save America from financial ruin. As joint commissioner he negotiated a commercial treaty with Prussia, proposed similar treaties with other European nations, and prepared to negotiate with the Barbary states. The commissioners also sought to resolve Anglo-American differences left over from the peace negotiations and arising from the two nations’ burgeoning trade. Volume 16 thus forms a prelude to the next phase of John Adams’ diplomatic career, for his February 1785 appointment as minister to the Court of St. James meant that the management of Anglo-American relations would be his responsibility alone.

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Papers of John Adams
John Adams
Harvard University Press, 1977
Vice President John Adams and the US government faced a turbulent world of rebellion in this volume of the Papers of John Adams, which chronicles the period from March 1791 to January 1797. The grim shadow of the French Revolution and the whirlwind of a massive European war left political leaders like Adams struggling to uphold the young nation’s neutrality. “I Suffer inexpressible Pains, from the bloody feats of War and Still more from those of Party Passions,” he observed. With the federal system newly in place, fresh challenges crept in on all sides. Adams and his colleagues sought to bolster the government against the effects of the Whiskey Rebellion, a seething partisan press, a brutal yellow fever epidemic in Philadelphia, and violent clashes with Native peoples on the Ohio frontier. Working with George Washington and an increasingly fractious cabinet, Adams approached a set of issues that defined US foreign policy for decades to come, including the negotiation, ratification, and funding of the controversial Jay Treaty, as well as the awkward cultivation of ties with France. Revealing exchanges to Adams from son John Quincy, a junior statesman who sent rich reports from war-torn Europe, underline the family’s enduring commitment to public service. Pausing on the cusp of his presidency, John Adams amplified his lifelong dedication to sustaining democracy, amid bouts of internal and external crisis: “I am happy that it has fallen to my share to do some thing towards setting the Machine in motion,” he wrote.
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Papers of John Adams
John Adams
Harvard University Press, 1977
John Adams’s shaping of the vice presidency dominates this volume of the Papers of John Adams, which chronicles a formative era in American government spanning June 1789 to February 1791. As the first federal Congress struggled to interpret the US Constitution and implement a new economic framework, Adams held fast to federalist principles and staked out boundaries for his executive powers. Meeting in New York City, Adams and his colleagues warred over how to collect revenue and where to locate the federal seat. They established and staffed the departments of state, treasury, and war. Adams focused on presiding over the Senate, where he broke several ties. Enduring the daily grind of politics, he lauded the “National Spirit” of his fellow citizens and pledged to continue laboring for the needs of the American people. “If I did not love them now, I would not Serve them another hour—for I very well know that Vexation and Chagrine, must be my Portion, every moment I shall continue in public Life,” Adams wrote. He plunged back into writing, using his Discourses on Davila to synthesize national progress with republican history. Whether or not the union would hold, as regional interests impeded congressional action, remained Adams’s chief concern. “There is every Evidence of good Intentions on all sides but there are too many Symptoms of old Colonial Habits: and too few, of great national Views,” he observed. Once again, John Adams’s frank letters reveal firsthand the labor of nation-building in an age of constitutions.
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Papers of John Adams
John Adams
Harvard University Press, 1977

“Huzza for the new World and farewell to the Old One,” John Adams wrote in late 1787, wrapping up a decade’s worth of diplomatic service in Europe. Volume 19 of the Papers of John Adams chronicles Adams’s last duties in London and The Hague. In the twenty-eight months documented here, he petitioned the British ministry to halt impressment of American sailors, toured the English countryside, and observed parliamentary politics. Adams salvaged U.S. credit by contracting two new Dutch loans amid the political chaos triggered by William V’s resurgence. Correspondents like Thomas Jefferson and the Marquis de Lafayette mulled over the Anglo–American trade war that followed the Revolution and reported on the French Assembly of Notables—topics that Adams commented on with trademark candor. He wrote the final two volumes of his work, A Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America.

Adams yearned to return home and see the American republic take shape. “For a Man who has been thirty Years rolling like a stone,” Adams wrote, the choice was whether to “set down in private Life to his Plough; or push into turbulent scenes of Sedition and Tumult; whether be sent to Congress, or a Convention or God knows what.” Back on his native soil of Massachusetts in June 1788, Adams settled into rural retirement with wife Abigail and watched the U.S. Constitution’s ratification evolve. By volume’s end, John Adams again resumes public life, ready to serve as America’s first vice president.

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Papers of John Adams
John Adams
Harvard University Press, 1977

"You may well Suppose that I was the Focus of all Eyes," John Adams wrote on 2 June 1785 of his first audience with George III, which formally inaugurated the post of American minister to Great Britain. Eager to restore "the old good Nature and the old good Humour" between the two nations, Adams spent the following months establishing the U.S. legation at No. 8 Grosvenor Square. For Adams, it was a period of multiple responsibilities and mixed success. He remained minister to the Netherlands and one of the joint commissioners charged with negotiating commercial treaties with the nations of Europe and North Africa--sensitive duties that occasionally called for Adams to encode his correspondence with the aid of his new secretary and future son-in-law, Col. William Stephens Smith.

Rebuffed by the British ministry in his mission to enforce the peace treaty of 1783 and renew Anglo-American commerce, Adams identified and achieved other goals. He preserved American credit despite the bankruptcy of a Dutch banking house that handled U.S. loans, petitioned for the release of impressed sailors, marked the ratification of the Prussian-American treaty, championed the needs of the American Episcopal Church, and laid the groundwork for negotiations with the Barbary States. His attention was not confined solely to foreign affairs. John Adams's letters from London, laced with his trademark candor, demonstrate his ripening Federalist view of the new American government's vulnerability and promise.

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Papers of John Adams
Adams FamilyEdited by Gregg L. Lint, C. James Taylor, Robert F. Karachuk, Hobson Woodward, Margaret A. Hogan, Sara B. Sikes, Mary T. Claffey, and Karen N. Barzilay
Harvard University Press, 1977

On September 3, 1783, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, and John Jay signed the definitive Anglo-American peace treaty. Adams and his colleagues strived to establish a viable relationship between the new nation and its largest trading partner but were stymied by rising British anti-Americanism.

Adams’ diplomatic efforts were also complicated by domestic turmoil. Americans, in a rehearsal for the later Federalist-Antifederalist conflict over the United States Constitution, were debating the proper relationship between the central government and the states. Adams, a Federalist as early as 1783, argued persuasively for a government that honored its treaties and paid its foreign debts. But when bills far exceeding the funds available for their redemption were sent to Europe, he was forced to undertake a dangerous winter journey to the Netherlands to raise a new loan and save the United States from financial disaster.

None of the founding fathers equals the candor of John Adams’ observations of his eighteenth-century world. His letters, always interesting, reveal with absolute clarity Adams’ positions on the personalities and issues of his times.

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Papers of John Adams
Edited by Gregg L. Lint, Margaret A. Hogan, C. James Taylor, Hobson Woodward, Mary T. Claffey, Sara B. Sikes, and Judith S. Graham
Harvard University Press, 1977

John Adams reached Paris on October 26, 1782, for the final act of the American Revolution: the peace treaty. This volume chronicles his role in the negotiations and the decision to conclude a peace separate from France. Determined that the United States pursue an independent foreign policy, Adams's letters criticized Congress's naive confidence in France. But in April 1783, frustrated at delays over the final treaty and at real and imagined slights from Congress and Benjamin Franklin, Adams believed the crux of the problem was Franklin's moral bankruptcy and servile Francophilia in the service of a duplicitous Comte de Vergennes.

Volume 14 covers more than just the peace negotiations. As American minister to the Netherlands, Adams managed the distribution of funds from the Dutch-American loan. Always an astute observer, he commented on the fall of the Shelburne ministry and its replacement by the Fox-North coalition, the future of the Anglo-American relationship, and the prospects for the United States in the post-revolutionary world. But he was also an anxious father, craving news of John Quincy Adams's slow journey from St. Petersburg to The Hague. By May 1783, Adams was tired of Europe, but resigned to remaining until his work was done.

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Papers of John Adams
Edited by Gregg L. Lint, Margaret A. Hogan, C. James Taylor, Jessie May Rodrique, Mary T. Claffey, and Hobson Woodward
Harvard University Press, 1977

A new chapter in John Adams's diplomatic career opened when the Dutch recognized the United States in April 1782. Operating from the recently purchased American legation at The Hague, Adams focused his energies on raising a much needed loan from Dutch bankers and negotiating a Dutch-American commercial treaty. This volume chronicles Adams's efforts to achieve these objectives, but it also provides an unparalleled view of eighteenth-century American diplomacy on the eve of a peace settlement ending the eight-year war of the American Revolution.

John Adams was a shrewd observer of the political and diplomatic world in which he functioned and his comments on events and personalities remain the most candid and revealing of any American in Europe. His correspondence traces the complex negotiations necessary to raise a Dutch loan and throws new light on his conclusion of a treaty of amity and commerce with the Netherlands, achievements of which he was most proud. Events in England and elsewhere in Europe also provided grist for his pen. Would the establishment in July of a new ministry under the earl of Shelburne hinder or advance the cause of peace? That question bedeviled Adams and his correspondents for the fate of the new nation literally rode on its answer. The volume ends with Adams's triumphal departure from The Hague to face new challenges at Paris as one of the American commissioners to negotiate an Anglo-American peace treaty.

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Papers of John Adams
John Adams
Harvard University Press, 1977

These volumes provide an unparalleled account of the conduct of American diplomacy in the early years of the republic, while the war with Britain continued and after the treaty of alliance with France was signed. John Adams served for ten months as a commissioner to France. Though he was the newest member of the three-man commission, he was its chief administrator, handling most of its correspondence, and his papers are the first full documentary record of the commission ever published. They provide a wealth of detail on every aspect of diplomacy, from negotiations with ministers of state to the arranging of prisoner exchanges.

The documents throw new light on Adams’s relations with his fellow commissioners, Benjamin Franklin and Arthur Lee. Historians have depicted Adams as hostile to Franklin and supportive of Lee, but the record shows that he found himself increasingly in disagreement with Lee, while working harmoniously with Franklin from the outset. Moreover, after the commission was disbanded in February 1779 and Franklin was appointed Minister to France—a move Adams had advocated—he undertook an important mission at Franklin’s behest. It is now clear that the rift that developed between the two statesmen did not begin until after Adams’s return to Paris in 1780.

Legal and constitutional scholars will find Volume 8 of particular interest. The Massachusetts Constitution of 1780, drafted by John Adams in 1779, served as a crucial source for the Constitution of the United States; today it is the oldest written constitution in the world still in effect. The earliest surviving version of Adams’s text, the Report of a Constitution for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, is here published with full annotation for the first time. It is John Adams’s most enduring constitutional work.

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Papers of John Adams
John Adams
Harvard University Press, 1977

These volumes document John Adams’s thinking and actions during the final years of his congressional service and take him through his first five months as a Commissioner in France in association with Benjamin Franklin and Arthur Lee.

While Adams was still in Philadelphia, military matters continued to he his major concern. Most demanding was his presidency of the Board of War, which took up his “whole Time, every Morning and Evening.” In general, though, the documents and reports of his conduct reveal a commitment to a national outlook. Congress should be a national legislature, and personal, state, and regional rivalries should give way to concern for the greater good—these were his deeply held convictions.

When chosen a Commissioner to France, Adams was reluctant to go. But duty and the honor of the position, along with the encouragement of an understanding and self-sacrificing wife, persuaded him to accept. With son John Quincy for a companion, he crossed the Atlantic to a new career. His initiation into the complexities of diplomacy brought a growing awareness of European affairs and the problems facing the new nation in the diplomatic arena. Letters deal with such varied topics as the supervision of American commercial agents in French ports, regulation of privateers, settlement of disputes between crews and officers, negotiation of loans, and help for American prisoners in England. Personal letters run the gamut from Adams’s views on the proper conduct of American diplomacy to strangers’ pleas for aid in locating relatives in America. Contrary to the usual impression of Adams as little more than a clerk for the Commission, evidence shows that he was its chief administrator.

Acclimation to living abroad among diplomats did not stifle Adams’s yearning for the simplicities of private life in the midst of his family. Yet as the important and interesting documents of this volume show, the groundwork was being laid for his even more significant role in diplomacy.

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Papers of John Adams
John Adams
Harvard University Press, 1977

As the American colonies grew more restive, and a break with the mother country ceased to be unthinkable, John Adams was forced to spend less and less time with his beloved family. Although burdened by ever-expanding responsibilities in the Second Continental Congress, he found time for an amazing amount of correspondence. The majority of his letters were written to secure the facts that would enable this duty-ridden man to decide and act effectively on the issues being debated. Military affairs, a source of never-ending concern, provide some of the most fascinating subjects, including several accounts of the Battle of Bunker Hill, assessments of various high-ranking officers, and complaints about the behavior of the riflemen sent from three states southward to aid the Massachusetts troops.

The heated question of pay for soldiers and officers strained relations between New England and southern colonies early. By refusing to confront the issue of slavery when it was raised by several correspondents, Adams sought to avoid exacerbating regional sensitivities further. When the question of independent governments for former colonies arose, at the request of several colleagues Adams sketched a model, Thoughts on Government, three versions of which are included here.

His optimistic republicanism, however, was balanced by fear that a “Spirit of Commerce” would undermine the virtue requisite for republican institutions. Adams' important committee work included his draft in 1775 of rules for regulation of the Continental Navy, which have remained the basis for the governance of the United States Navy down into our own time, and his plan of treaties, which would guide American diplomats up to World War II. Both were derivative, but he skillfully adapted his materials to American needs and circumstances. These volumes reflect the spirit of those tumultuous years when the leaders emerging in America confronted each other, and exciting new ideas, as they tried to resolve the issues of a revolutionary period.

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Patrick White Letters
Patrick White
University of Chicago Press, 1996
"Letters are the devil, and I always hope that any I have written have been destroyed."—Patrick White

Patrick White spent his whole life writing letters. He wanted them all burnt, but thousands survive to reveal him as one of the greatest letter-writers of his time. Patrick White: Letters is an unexpected and final volume of prose by Australia's most acclaimed novelist. Only a few scraps of White's letters have been published before.

From the aftermath of the First World War until his death in 1990, letters poured from White's pen: they are shrewd, funny, dramatic, pigheaded, camp, and above all, hauntingly beautiful. He wrote novels to sway a hostile world, but letters were for friends.

The culmination of ten years' work and reflection by David Marr, author of the well-received biography Patrick White: A Life, the volume tells the story of White's life in his own words. These are the letters of a great writer, a profound critic, a gossip with the sharpest eyes and tongue, a man who loved and hated ferociously, a keen cook, an angry patriot, and a believer never free of doubt.

"A literary milestone."—Kirkus Reviews

"Mean-spirited and brilliant, the 600 letters collected here offer real insight into the life of the Nobel-Prize winning Australian author. White's venom is matched by his torment, and the whole volume is redeemed by outstanding writing."—Publisher's Weekly ("Best Books 96")

"[T]hose who come to these letters after having read Marr's biography will expect more than shop talk from the master novelist. They will expect the bracing bitchiness of a master curmudgeon. And they will not be disappointed."—Frank Wilson, Philadelphia Inquirer

Patrick White (1912-1990), Australian novelist and playwright, won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1973. His many novels include Voss, The Twyborn Affair, and Riders in the Chariot.
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People in a Magazine
The Selected Letters of S. N. Behrman and His Editors at "The New Yorker"
Joseph Goodrich
University of Massachusetts Press, 2018
Playwright, biographer, screenwriter, and critic S. N. Behrman (1893–1973) characterized the years he spent writing for The New Yorker as a time defined by "feverish contact with great theatre stars, rich people and social people at posh hotels, at parties, in mansions and great estates." While he hobnobbed with the likes of Mary McCarthy, Elia Kazan, and Greta Garbo and was one of Broadway's leading luminaries, Behrman would later admit that the friendships he built with the magazine's legendary editors Harold Ross, William Shawn, and Katharine S. White were the "one unalloyed felicity" of his life.

People in a Magazine collects Behrman's correspondence with his editors along with telegrams, interoffice memos, and editorial notes drawn from the magazine's archives—offering an unparalleled view of mid-twentieth-century literary life and the formative years of The New Yorker, from the time of Behrman's first contributions to the magazine in 1929 until his death.
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Philippics 1–6
Edited and translated by D. R. Shackleton BaileyRevised by John T. Ramsey and Gesine Manuwald
Harvard University Press, 2009

Invectives against Antony.

Cicero (Marcus Tullius, 106–43 BC), Roman advocate, orator, politician, poet, and philosopher, about whom we know more than we do of any other Roman, lived through the stirring era that saw the rise, dictatorship, and death of Julius Caesar in a tottering republic. In Cicero’s political speeches 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, 58 survive (a few incompletely), 29 of which are addressed to the Roman people or Senate, the rest to jurors. 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. This correspondence affords a revelation of the man, all the more striking because most of the letters were not intended for publication. Six works on rhetorical subjects survive intact and another in fragments. Seven major philosophical works are extant in part or in whole, and there are a number of shorter compositions either preserved or known by title or fragments.

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

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Philippics 7–14
Edited and translated by D. R. Shackleton BaileyRevised by John T. Ramsey and Gesine Manuwald
Harvard University Press, 2009

Invectives against Antony.

Cicero (Marcus Tullius, 106–43 BC), Roman advocate, orator, politician, poet, and philosopher, about whom we know more than we do of any other Roman, lived through the stirring era that saw the rise, dictatorship, and death of Julius Caesar in a tottering republic. In Cicero’s political speeches 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, 58 survive (a few incompletely), 29 of which are addressed to the Roman people or Senate, the rest to jurors. 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. This correspondence affords a revelation of the man, all the more striking because most of the letters were not intended for publication. Six works on rhetorical subjects survive intact and another in fragments. Seven major philosophical works are extant in part or in whole, and there are a number of shorter compositions either preserved or known by title or fragments.

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

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Poe in His Own Time
A Biographical Chronicle of His Life, Drawn from Recollections, Interviews, and Memoirs by Family, Friends, and Associates
Benjamin F. Fisher
University of Iowa Press, 2010

An image of Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849) as a man of gloom and mystery continues to hold great popular appeal. Long recognized as one of the greats of American literature, he elicited either highly commendatory or absolutely hostile reactions from many who knew him, from others who claimed to comprehend him as person or as writer, and from still others who circulated as fact opinions intuited from his writings. Whether promoting him as angel or demon, “a man of great and original genius” or “extraordinarily wicked,” the viewpoints in this dramatic collection of primary materials provide vigorous testimony to support the contradictory images of the man and the writer that have prevailed for a century and a half.
     Noted Poe scholar Benjamin Fisher includes a comprehensive introduction and a detailed chronology of Poe’s sadly short life; each entry is introduced by a short headnote that places the selection in historical and cultural context, and explanatory notes provide information about people and places. From John Allan’s letter to Secretary of War John Eaton about Poe’s West Point life to John Frankenstein’s hostile verse casting him as an alcoholic, from Rufus Griswold’s first and second posthumous vilifications to James Russell Lowell’s more sensible outline of his life and career, from scornful to commendable reviews to scathing attacks on his morals to recognition of his comic achievements, Fisher has gathered a lively array of materials that read like the most far-fetched of gothic tales.
     Poe himself was creative when he supplied information to others about his life and literary career, and the speculative content of many of the portrayals presented in this collection read as if their authors had set out to be equally creative. The sixty-nine recollections gathered in Poe in His Own Time form a dramatic, real-time biographical narrative designed to provide a multitude of perspectives on the famous author, sometimes in conflict with each other and sometimes in agreement but always arresting.

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The Poems and Letters of Tullia d'Aragona and Others
A Bilingual Edition
Tullia d'Aragona and Others, Edited by Julia L. Hairston, Translated by Julia L. Hairston
Iter Press, 2014

Hairston has constructed a full personal, cultural and literary biography for d’Aragona, using newly discovered letters, archival material of other kinds, and contemporary theory about gender in women’s writing. Footnotes establish the intricacy of Tullia’s intellectual networks and her courting of intellectuals in rhyme. Hairston includes poems written to d’Aragona, including Girolamo Muzio’s long pastoral, Tirrhenia. She addresses with tact the question of how sexual Tullia’s relationships were with her various interlocutors. At times, as she says, one just can’t know, but that the issue is much less important than the poems themselves. I agree wholeheartedly. This is the editor Tullia has been waiting for: an indefatigable researcher, a creative biographer, and a precise and appreciative literary critic.
—Ann Rosalind Jones
Esther Cloudman Dunn Professor of Comparative Literature, Smith College

The figure of Tullia d’Aragona has long fascinated readers as the prototype of the “honest courtesan”, a woman who successfully exploited her physical and intellectual charms to win the adoration and respect of the Italian cultural elite. With Julia Hairston’s richly annotated edition of her collected verse, the product of more than a decade of scholarship, d’Aragona finally comes into focus also as poet. She emerges in this volume as one of the most distinctive protagonists in a key transitional moment in Italian literary history, when the aristocratic tradition of Petrarchist lyric began to be reshaped and democratized by its encounter with print.
—Virginia Cox
Professor of Italian, New York University

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The Poet and Dream Girl
The Love Letters of Lilian Steichen and Carl Sandburg
Edited by Margaret Sandburg
University of Illinois Press, 1987
"These letters reveal the thoughts of two fine, strong minds drawn to each other first by their interest in socialism, then by their love of poetry and a similarity of ethics and ideals. My mother recognized this in his early prose and poetry. They learned so much about each other from these letters, yet it seems extraordinary that there was so little personal contact."-- From the introduction by Margaret Sandburg
 
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The Poet and the Sailor
The Story of My Friendship with Carl Sandburg
Kenneth Dodson. Edited by Richard Dodson. Foreword by Penelope Niven
University of Illinois Press, 2006
Two friends, a lifetime of letters, and an intimate look at a literary icon

Carl Sandburg first encountered Kenneth Dodson through a letter written at sea during World War II. Though Dodson wrote the letter to his wife, Letha, Sandburg read it in tears and told her, "I've got to meet this man." Composed primarily of their correspondence that continued until Sandburg's death in 1967, The Poet and the Sailor is a chronicle of the deep friendship that followed. Ranging over anything they found important, from writing to health and humor, the letters are arranged by Richard Dodson and are accompanied by a foreword from Sandburg's noted biographer, Penelope Niven.

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Political Vocabularies
FDR, the Clergy Letters, and the Elements of Political Argument
Mary E. Stuckey
Michigan State University Press, 2018
Political Vocabularies: FDR, the Clergy Letters, and the Elements of Political Argument uses a set of letters sent to Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1935 by American clergymen to make a larger argument about the rhetorical processes of our national politics. At any given moment, national politics are constituted by competing political imaginaries, through which citizens understand and participate in politics. Different imaginaries locate political authority in different places, and so political authority is very much a site of dispute between differing political vocabularies. Opposing political vocabularies are grounded in opposing characterizations of the specific political moment, its central issues, and its citizens, for we cannot imagine a political community without populating it and giving it purpose. These issues and people are hierarchically ordered, which provides the imaginary with a sense of internal cohesion and which also is a central point of disputation between competing vocabularies in a specific epoch. Each vocabulary is grounded in a political tradition, read through our national myths, which authorize the visions of national identity and purpose and which contain significant deliberative aspects, for each vision of the nation impels distinct political imperatives. Such imaginaries are our political priorities in action. Taking one specific moment of political change, the author illuminates the larger processes of change, competition, and stability in national politics.
 
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Political Writings
Coluccio Salutati
Harvard University Press, 2014
Coluccio Salutati (1332–1406) was chancellor of the Florentine Republic (1375–1406) and the leader of the humanist movement in Italy in the generation after Petrarch and Boccaccio. As such, he was among the first humanists to apply his Classical learning to political theory and his rhetorical skills to the defense of republican liberty. This volume contains a new English version of Salutati’s important treatise On Tyranny, Antonio Loschi’s Invective against the Florentines, which provoked Salutati’s long Reply to a Slanderous Detractor, and a selection of Salutati’s state letters written for the Florentine Republic. Most of the texts are here critically edited and translated into English for the first time.
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Portraits of the Queen Mother
Polemics, Panegyrics, Letters
Catherine de Médicis and Others
Iter Press, 2014
Catherine de Médicis was portrayed in her day as foreign usurper, loving queen and queen mother, patron of the arts, and Machiavellian murderer of Protestants. Leah L. Chang and Katherine Kong assemble a diverse array of scathing polemic and lofty praise, diplomatic reports, and Catherine’s own letters, which together show how one extraordinary woman’s rule intersected with early modern conceptions of gender, maternity, and power.
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Post Scripts
The Writer’s Workshop
Vincent Kaufmann
Harvard University Press, 1994

We assume that words are posted (mailed or, in another sense, positioned) to communicate with others, to bridge distance and “wish you were here.” But Vincent Kaufmann discovers in his chosen letter writers the urgency not to communicate, to keep their correspondents away and, as it were, posted. The writer avoids real-life dialogue by way of letters, which then become proving grounds for the work to come. Whatever their intellectual, biographical, or aesthetic value—compare Flaubert’s passionate dogmatizing to Baudelaire’s peevish nagging for money—letters teach writers how to appreciate the sound of their own voice and how to make a workable literary space. Distance gives the relentless letter writer the chance to become a writer. Kaufmann, with Lacan, says that what characterizes the literary text is the ability to get beyond a particular other to address the Other, which must be no one in particular.

Kaufmann features several European writers, all of them avidly concerned about the destination of speech when it passes into writing. Among them: Kafka, obsessions spilling over, adoring his fiancee for her emptiness; Proust, master of suffering, with his interminable health bulletins, cancellations, and condolences; Flaubert, an extraordinary letter writer, abandoning his mistress for the more seductive Emma Bovary; Baudelaire, determined in squalor, writing letters almost exclusively about his debts, as if to practice the art of escape and defiance; Mallarmé, patron saint of littérateurs, whose vaunted Book disappears into salons and letters; Artaud, speaker in tongues, who wildly searched for authenticity through letters.

Unending attention has been devoted to these important writers, but they seem new again when viewed in Kaufmann’s epistolary mirror. What they share is a taste, or need, for distance and perversion; we see them becoming “inhuman” in order to textualize their lives. They are all modernists, and the definition of Modernism is thereby deepened. This book—rich in anecdote and humor—escorts literary theory into the no-man’s-land stretching between the life and the word.

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Postal Indiscretions
The Correspondence of Tadeusz Borowski
Tadeusz Drewnowski
Northwestern University Press, 2007
In a brief life deeply and traumatically disrupted by two years in concentration camps as a political prisoner, Tadeusz Borowski (1922–1951) was tragically destined to become one of the most eloquent witnesses to the Holocaust in Poland. His recollections and stories, the most famous of which is This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen, document in stark historical, literary, and personal terms the experience of the camps and its cost to humanity.  ​

This correspondence in this volume expands on the insights of Borowski’s published work and extends to the less-documented aftermath of the Holocaust in postwar Poland and East Germany. The volume opens with Borowski’s letter to his mother from Pawiak Prison the day after his arrest and closes with an unsigned telegram informing his parents of his suicide. The letters to and from family members, friends, and literary figures offer an indispensable picture of the world in the wake of the Nazis—and of the indelible stain that experience left upon the literature, politics, and life of Eastern Europe, in particular upon one gifted and doomed writer.
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Post-Manifesto Polygamy
The 1899 to 1904 Correspondence of Helen, Owen and Avery Woodruff
Lu Ann Faylor Snyder and Phillip A. Snyder
Utah State University Press, 2009

These letters among two women and their husband offer a rare look into the personal dynamics of an LDS polygamous relationship. Abraham “Owen” Woodruff was a young Mormon apostle, the son of President Wilford Woodruff, remembered for the Woodruff Manifesto, which called for the divinely inspired termination of plural marriage. It eased a systematic federal judicial assault on Mormons and made Utah statehood possible. It did not end polygamy in the church. Some leaders continued to encourage and perform such marriages. Owen Woodruff himself contracted a secretive, second marriage to Avery Clark. Pressure on the LDS church revived with hearings regarding Reed Smoot’s seat in the U. S. Senate. After church president Joseph F. Smith issued the so-called Second Manifesto in 1904, polygamy and its more prominent advocates were mostly expunged from mainstream Mormonism. Owen Woodruff was not excommunicated, as a couple of his apostolic colleagues were. He and his first wife, Helen May Winters, had died suddenly that same year after contracting smallpox in Mexico. Owen Woodruff had often been “on the underground,” moving frequently, traveling under secret identities, and using code names in his letters to his wives, while still carrying out his administrative duties, which, in particular, involved supervision of the nascent Mormon colonies in the Big Horn Basin of Wyoming.

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Postmodern Explained
Correspondence 1982-1985
Jean-Fracois Lyotard
University of Minnesota Press, 1992

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Pound/Cummings
The Correspondence of Ezra Pound and E.E. Cummings
Barry Ahearn, Editor
University of Michigan Press, 1996
Ezra Pound and E. E. Cummings carried on a long and varied correspondence from the 1920s until Cummings's death in 1962. This volume collects all of the important letters from this important friendship in the history of modern poetry.
Throughout the correspondence both poets reveal themselves and their beliefs to a remarkable degree. Pound entrusted to Cummings details of his political outlook in the 1930s and 1940s, including his opinions about Mussolini's Italy. The letters to Cummings also shed new light on the question of Pound's sanity after World War II. Although he was diagnosed as mentally unfit, the letters generally show no evidence of paranoia, only of his characteristic eccentricity.
Similarly, these letters should provoke a reevaluation of Cummings. Critics have treated Cummings's political views as either strictly private matters or merely incidental to his art. The letters, however, show that Cummings's radically conservative political opinions are wholly consistent with his poetics, and raise the question of the relation between Cummings's political principles and his enthusiasm for particular forms (and particular stars) of mass entertainment.
In addition to their political revelations, the letters are steeped in the literary climate--and literary gossip--of the times. Pound comments often and candidly on Cummings's poetry and prose; both Pound and Cummings send light verse to each other. And the poets exchange anecdotes about such figures as Henry James, Wyndham Lewis, T. S. Eliot, Edmund Grosse, Max Eastman, and Aldous Huxley, among other writers.
There is much here to interest and delight both fans and foes of Pound and Cummings. The book will be of primary importance to students and scholars of modern poetry, especially those who emphasize the intersection of literary works and political history.
Barry Ahearn is Associate Professor of English, Tulane University.
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The Prendergast Letters
Correspondence from Famine-Era Ireland, 1840–1850
Shelley Barber
University of Massachusetts Press, 2006
The Prendergast Letters Collection, one of the noteworthy manuscript collections at Boston College's John J. Burns Library, provides an account of the experiences of an ordinary family in County Kerry, Ireland, from 1840 to 1850. The letters include myriad details of the lives of family members and neighbors, reports of weather, agriculture, and local events and economy, along with commentary on matters of national importance such as politician Daniel O'Connell's movement for the Repeal of the Act of Union.

Most important, the letters offer a rare contemporary, firsthand account of Ireland's an Gorta Mor, the Great Famine that began with the failure of the potato crop in 1845. Letters written in the months and years following the announcement of the first crop failure provide insight into not only the sufferings of one family but also the response of the community and nation as this crisis transformed Ireland.

James and Elizabeth Prendergast were the parents of six children. Their letters from Milltown, County Kerry, dictated to a scrivener, were posted to sons Thomas and Jeffrey and daughter Julia Riordan and her husband Cornelius, all of whom had emigrated in search of employment to Boston, Massachusetts—a city that would itself be transformed by the famine-era influx of Irish immigrants.

In addition to transcriptions of the forty-eight letters in the collection, this volume includes contextual essays by historian Ruth-Ann Harris and genealogist Marie Daly. The evidence of the letters themselves, along with the contributions of Harris and Daly, demonstrate the ways in which the family of James Prendergast was at once exceptional and typical.
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Prisoner for Polygamy
The Memoirs and Letters of Rudger Clawson at the Utah Territorial Penitentiary, 1884-87
Edited by Stan Larson
University of Illinois Press, 1993
This collection of the prison memoirs and letters of the first Mormon
        convicted of violating the Edmunds Law, which prohibited polygamy, provides
        a unique perspective on this period of Utah history. Rudger Clawson (1857-1943)
        was a prominent member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints,
        serving as missionary, stake president, apostle, president of the Quorum
        of the Twelve Apostles, and counselor in the First Presidency.
      His memoirs of three years as a "cohab" in the Utah Territorial
        Penitentiary are published here for the first time. They reflect the pride
        Mormon polygamists felt at being "prisoners for conscience sake,"
        and they include discussions of Mormon doctrines, accounts of daring prison
        escapes, details of prison life, and the sense of a husband's frustration
        at being separated from his plural wife.
            
 
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Pushkin on Literature
Tatiana Wolff
Northwestern University Press, 1998
Pushkin on Literature approaches Pushkin's literary accomplishment from a unique perspective: it focuses on Pushkin the critic, and on his passionate enthusiasm, volatile judgments, joy, frustration, and fascination with the literary world that surrounded him. This is the only English-language edition of the complete set of Pushkin's critical writing, both on his own work and on the wide range of European literature--Byron, Shakespeare, Voltaire, Milton--which he read and studied, and which so profoundly influenced his own writing.
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