BiblioVault - Books about Letters

Renaissance Man of Cannery Row

The Life and Letters of Edward F. Ricketts

Edward F. Ricketts, edited by Katharine A. Rodger

University of Alabama Press, 2002

This portrait of one of John Steinbeck's closest friends illuminates the life and work of a figure central to the development of scientific and literary thought in the 20th century.

Marine biologist Edward F. Ricketts is perhaps best known as the inspiration for John Steinbeck's most empathic literary characters Doc in Cannery Row, Slim in Of Mice and Men, Jim Casy in The Grapes of Wrath, and Lee in East of Eden. The correspondence of this accomplished scientist, writer, and philosopher reveals the influential exchange of ideas he shared with such prominent thinkers and artists as Henry Miller, Joseph Campbell, Ellwood Graham, and James Fitzgerald, in addition to Steinbeck, all of whom were drawn to Ricketts's Monterey Bay laboratory, a haven of intellectual discourse and Bohemian culture in the 1930s and 1940s.

The 125 previously unpublished letters of this collection, housed at the Stanford University Library, document the broad range of Ricketts's interests and accomplishments during the last 12 and most productive years of his life. His handbook on Pacific marine life, Between Pacific Tides, is still in print, now in its fifth edition. The biologist's devotion to ecological conservation and his evolving philosophy of science as a cross-disciplinary, holistic pursuit led to the publication of The Sea of Cortez. Many of Ricketts's letters discuss his studies of the Pacific littoral and his theories of “phalanx” and transcendence. Epistles to family members, often tender and humorous, add dimension and depth to Steinbeck's mythologized depictions of Ricketts. Katharine A. Rodger has enriched the correspondence with an introductory biographical essay and a list of works cited.

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Reunited

The Correspondence of Anaïs and Joaquín Nin, 1933–1940

Anaïs Nin; Joaquín Nin

Ohio University Press, 2020

The incestuous affair between the writer Anaïs Nin and her father, the pianist-composer Joaquín Nin, is well documented in the volume of her unexpurgated diary published under the title Incest. What has been missing from that account is Joaquín’s point of view. Reunited: The Correspondence of Anaïs and Joaquín Nin, 1933–1940 presents more than one hundred intimate communications between these two artistic geniuses, revealing not only the dynamics of their complex relationship but also why Anaïs spent her life in a never-ending battle to feel loved, appreciated, and understood. Reunited collects the correspondence between Anaïs and Joaquín just before, during, and after the affair, which commenced in 1933, twenty years after he had abandoned his ten-year-old daughter and the rest of his family. These letters were long believed to have been destroyed and lost to history. In 2006, however, a folder containing Joaquín’s original letters to his daughter was discovered in Anaïs’s Los Angeles home, along with a second folder of her letters to him. Together, these letters tell the story of an absent father’s attempt to reconnect with his adult daughter and how that rapprochement quickly turned into an illicit sexual relationship.

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Robert B. Heilman and Eric Voegelin

A Friendship in Letters, 1944-1984

Edited & Intro by Charles R. Embry & Foreword by Champlin B. Heilman

University of Missouri Press, 2004

This collection of letters exchanged between Robert B. Heilman and Eric Voegelin records a friendship that lasted more than forty years. These scholars, both giants in their own fields, shared news of family and events, academic gossip, personal and professional vicissitudes, academic successes, and, most important, ideas.

Heilman and Voegelin first became acquainted around 1941, when Voegelin delivered a guest lecture for the political science department at Louisiana State University. At that time, Heilman was teaching in the English department at LSU along with Robert Penn Warren and Cleanth Brooks. What began as simple exchanges after Voegelin moved to LSU soon grew into full-fledged correspondence—beginning with an eight-page letter by Voegelin commenting on Heilman’s manuscripton Shakespeare’s King Lear. Their correspondence lasted until four months before Voegelin’s death in January 1985.

These letters represent Voegelin’s most prolonged correspondence with a native-born American scholar and provide readers with an insight into Voegelin as a literary critic. While Voegelin’s analysis of Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw is well known, these letters reveal the context from which the analysis grew. Additional comments by Voegelin on Mann, Eliot, Shakespeare, Homer, Proust, Flaubert, and other significant writers are uncovered throughout his exchanges with Heilman.

Readers will appreciate not only Heilman’s elegant style but also his efforts to clarify for himself the meaning and implications of Voegelin’s developing philosophy. Heilman’s questions are often ones that readers of Voegelin continue to ask today. In his queries, as well as in the exposition of his theories of tragedy and melodrama, human nature, and expressionist drama, Heilman displays a canny perception of the philosophical issues and problems of modernity that sustained their interdisciplinary discussion. The letters exchanged by Robert B. Heilman and Eric Voegelin demonstrate the warm friendship these two scholars shared and illuminate many of the turns and transformations in their work as they developed as thinkers.

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Robert Oppenheimer

Letters and Recollections

Robert Oppenheimer

Harvard University Press, 1980

A Russian Prince in the Soviet State

Hunting Stories, Letters from Exile, and Military Memoirs

Vladimir Trubetskoi

Northwestern University Press, 2006

Of a noble and distinguished family disenfranchised by the Bolshevik revolution, Vladimir Trubetskoi (1892-1937) alone remmained in Russia, and suffered the consequences.His life and experiences are well documented in this remarkable volume, a selection of his writings that reflects his comfortable prewar existence and his post-revolutionary poverty, uncertainty, and displacement, all conveyed with humor and ironic detachment. Including selections from Trubetskoi's memoirs, his letters from exile in Uzbekistan, and his hunting stories, the chapters of this volume offer autobiographical narratives of the self, creative "reflections," ethnography, and, most of all, uniquely evocative and informative instances of history lived and recorded with quiet power and irrepressible character.
In his letters from exile, Trubetskoi describes his grim situation in Central Asia-how he snatched moments to write between mornings playing piano in a ballet studio and late nights in a restaurant band, struggling with the heat, the insect-borne illness, and the problems of a large, uprooted family. His memoirs of 1911-12, "Notes of a Cuirassier," are the culmination of his efforts and they convey in vivid detail the glittering prewar world of an elite Russian Guards regiment. These reminiscences as well as his stories offer a glimpse of what life was like for a citizen of Imperial Russia who tried to make a life for himself in the new Soviet state. Instructive, amusing, moving, Trubetskoi's stories are also an inspiring example of how a person of grace and true nobility meets large-scale social and political upheaval.

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