The Mailboox
Letters, letter writing, and Lexer recommended
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Clicking on a photo, or a link in the descriptions to the right of the photos, will take you to Powell's bookstore. Any purchase you make by following one of these links will help support LEX – not just these items but any book or DVD in their inventory. Below the photo section are links to books that can be read online or downloaded free at Project Gutenberg. More books coming soon! |
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Selected from thousands of handwritten letters in the Reagan archives, Dear Americans: Letters from the Desk of Ronald Reagan, edited by Ralph E. Weber, collects a chronological sampling of letters written from "The Great Communicator" to strangers and friends, children and adults, during his eight years in office. Lexer recommended. |
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Half a century ago international reporter Geraldine Brooks was growing up in Australia, writing to pen pals around the world. As an adult she decided to reconnect with those whose letters had influenced her personal life and her choice of career; she recounts the inner and outer story from the beginning in Foreign Correspondence: A Pen Pal's Journey from Down Under to All Over.
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Replies of over 30 American Presidents to children's letters are collected in Dear Young Friend: The Letters of American Presidents to Children" by Stanley and Rodelle Weintraub. |
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From Queen Elizabeth I to Casanova to John Lennon, letters and other documents are collected, mostly in full-page reproductions with accompanying transcription and explanatory text, in True to the Letter: 800 Years of Remarkable Correspondence, Documents and Photographs by Pedro Correa Do Lago, President of the National Library of Brazil. Lexer recommended.
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The Screwtape Letters by theologian (and Narnia author) C.S. Lewis began a tradition of religious entities writing letters; in the original the senior demon Screwtape gives advice to his up-and-coming nephew Wormwood on how to best tempt people away from the Christian life. Contemporary versions include:
Not to be outdone, the good side has its own instructional correspondence in the form of The Gabriel Letters (Advice to a Young Angel) and The Return of Gabriel: The Gabriel Letters, Book II, More Advice to a Young Angel by Richard V. Shriver.
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In contrast to the demons and angels in the books to the left, children's books often feature less cosmic non-human entities and their correspondence. Some examples:
- Dear Peter Rabbit by Alma Flor Ada is an illustrated collection of the letters of Peter Rabbit, Goldilocks, Little Red Riding Hood and others, centered around a housewarming party for one of the Three Little Pigs.
- In Dear Mrs. Larue: Letters From Obedience School, a dog named Ike writes to his owner about the horrible treatment he's receiving at the Igor Brotweiler Canine Academy, while illustrations reveal the true situation.
- A sequel, Detective LaRue: Letters from the Investigation, has Ike wrongly accused of stealing cat treats and having to find the real perpetrator in order to clear himself.
- In The T.F. Letters by Karen Ray, young Alex has just started losing her baby teeth, and her family is moving to another state. So with each tooth she puts under her pillow, she asks the Tooth Fairy for advice on coping with all the changes, and gets it – in penmanship surprisingly similar to her mother's...
- Those yearly holiday letters aren't a new tradition; starting in the 1920s the jolly old elf himself sent The Father Christmas Letters to the children of J.R.R. Tolkien, discussing the year's news from the North Pole.
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The Art of the Handwritten Note by Margaret Shepherd. Features helpful tips for everything "from overcoming illegible penmanship to mastering the challenge of keeping straight margins, avoiding smeared ink, and choosing stationery that is appropriate but suits your style". Lexer recommended.
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Write Out of the Oven!: Letters and Recipes from Children's Authors by Josephine Waltz collects letters from students to well-known children's authors, and a recipe from each author. Judy Blume, Philip Pullman, Natalie Babbitt, Brian Jacques, E.L. Konigsburg and about four dozen other authors took part.
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Posterity: Letters of Great Americans to Their Children by Dorie McCullough Lawson. Three centuries of personal letters from 68 famous American men and women to their children, including Thomas Jefferson, Groucho Marx, Laura Ingalls Wilder, Woody Guthrie, and many more.
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Every Pitcher Tells a Story: Letters Gathered by a Devoted Fan collects 100 letters that Seth Swirsky (author of several similar books of letters from baseball players and fans) received from baseball pitchers he wrote to, as well as rare historical letters of famous pitchers.
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Contemporary writing too familiar? Try The Amarna Letters, a translation from cuneiform tablets of Egyptian court correspondence of some 3300 years ago.
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Gift of a Letter by Alexandra Stoddard.
This enchanting book is dedicated to one of the most intimate and touching of human experiences – the letter. Lexer recommended.
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Ever think it would be fun to write a really weird letter, such as telling a hotel you left your sword in their establishment, or asking a casino if you can gamble dressed in your lucky shrimp costume? Ted Nancy (widely believed to be a pseudonym for Jerry Seinfeld) did, and Letters From a Nut collects many of these and the usually straight replies they garnered. Other books are available in this series, as well as similarly comic efforts by Don Novello (who wrote as Lazlo Toth), James C. Wade, Paul Davidson, Sterling Huck, and Paul Rosa. Lexer recommended.
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Many accounts of life on the American frontier suggest drudgery, hardship and tragedy were unremitting companions. Elinore Pruitt Stewart shows a different facet as she writes an engrossing tale of life on a Wyoming ranch in a series of letters to her former city employer, Letters of a Woman Homesteader, first published in 1914.
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Links to Project Gutenberg's etexts
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While the letters from "Old Gorgon Graham" (see Issues 6, 7, and 8) are fiction, 150 years earlier Lord Chesterfield spent a quarter century writing real Letters To His Son On the Fine Art of Becoming a Man of the World and a Gentleman.
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In the 18th century, Lady Mary Wortley Montague was widely considered to be a paragon of letter-writing. See if you agree by reading Letters of the Right Honourable Lady M--y W--y M--e Written during Her Travels in Europe, Asia and Africa to Persons of Distinction, Men of Letters, &c. in Different Parts of Europe.
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Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, best known for the Sherlock Holmes canon, began his career as a doctor and became a writer while waiting for patients, who were not numerous. In The Stark Munro Letters, he presents a series of fictional letters which are widely believed to be at least partly autobiographical, dealing with his own views on medicine and religion, among other topics.
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Can't get enough of letters from Presidents? Check out Theodore Roosevelt's Letters to His Children.
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Letters (except letters to the editor) are usually written with the hope and expectation of receiving a response. But the letter form lends itself to much more than that, as Andrew Lang's Letters to Dead Authors shows. Here are letters to deceased literary figures from the recent past and the distant past, including Jane Austen, Herodotus, Lord Byron, Edgar Allan Poe, and many others.
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Letters can be instructive as well as entertaining. Playwright Abraham Dreyfus asked about a dozen other playwrights for advice on "how a play is made", and in 1916 James Brander Matthews collected them into How to Write a Play. The advice ranges from a detailed discussion of the interplay between the audience and the content of the play, to the pithy (but not perhaps very helpful) "Have genius!"
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Very early letters were often political directives or religious treatises using the letter form (as many books in the New Testament are), yet some also made time for the mundane. In Letters of Pliny the Younger one can find both, from "How ignominious then must his conduct be who turns good government into anarchy, and liberty into slavery?" to "Is the weather with you as rude and boisterous as it is with us?".
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In Volume 1 and Volume 2 of the Correspondence of Wagner and Liszt, the two composers discuss topics ranging from music to politics to philosophy, with a bit of daily life (especially monetary troubles) now and then as well.
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Many of the earliest novels were written in the form of letters, and that tradition continues to the present. One example is Göthe's The Sorrows of Young Werther.
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Writing novels in the form of letters could make it easy for the author to contrast views on a topic, as Letters of Two Brides did for Honoré de Balzac.
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