Read more
Delve into the lives and work of some of the world's great writers with this intriguing collection of correspondence.
There is much to discover in this illustrated compendium of letters written by great novelists, poets, playwrights and essayists, from Cervantes to the present day.
One hundred letters and notes from Mark Twain, Oscar Wilde, Jane Austen, Virginia Woolf, Jack Kerouac and Chinua Achebe among many others are reproduced, together with a transcript of the correspondence and background details which provide their context. Arranged thematically, the book contains personal musings on love, happiness, work, daily life, money, politics, travel and the creative process.
For lovers of literature, these rare documents provide fascinating insights into writers' daily lives, relationships and work. In the era of SMS, email and instant message, Writers' Letters reminds us of the treasures to be found in a simple letter.
List of contents
01. 'Got My Steam Up': Work in Progress
Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, T.S. Eliot, Henrik Ibsen, Doris Lessing, Norman Mailer, Yukio Mishima, Sylvia Plath
02. 'In This Strange Country': Places and People
Elizabeth Bishop, Charlotte Bronte, Colette, Federico Garcia Lorca, Vladimir Nabokov
03. 'My Glory Days': Writer to Writer
Samuel Beckett, Anton Chekhov, Joseph Conrad, E.M. Forster, Ernest Hemingway, Toni Morrison, Iris Murdoch, V.S. Naipaul, Leo Tolstoy, William Butler Yeats, Emile Zola
04. 'The Dreadful Steel': When Troubles Come
Charles Baudelaire, Walter Benjamin, Frances Burney, Miguel de Cervantes, Franz Kafka, Arthur Rimbaud, Paul Verlaine, Oscar Wilde
05. 'I Love Your Verse': Friends and Lovers
Guillaume Apollinaire, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, John Berryman, Emily Dickinson, Mary Godwin, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Keats, Philip Larkin, Arthur Miller, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Virginia Woolf
06. 'Yes I Am Radical': This is History
George Eliot, Gustave Flaubert, Nadine Gordimer, Victor Hugo, Zora Neale Hurston, Samuel Johnson, Jack Kerouac, Siegfried Sassoon, Stendhal, Mark Twain
07. 'Too Darned Stupid': Patrons, Public, Publishers
Chinua Achebe, Honoré de Balzac, Bertolt Brecht, Angela Carter, Shelagh Delaney, David Foster Wallace, Thomas Hardy, James Joyce, D.H. Lawrence, Ezra Pound, Ayn Rand, George Bernard Shaw, Jonathan Swift
08. 'That's All': Last Words
Lord Byron, Seamus Heaney, Katherine Mansfield, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Mary Wollstonecraft, Stefan Zweig
About the author
Michael Bird is a writer and art historian. His books include Artists' Letters: Leonardo da Vinci to David Hockney (White Lion Publishing, 2019), Studio Voices: Art and Life in 20th-century Britain and The St Ives Artists: A Biography of Place and Time. He is Royal Literary Fund Fellow at the University of Exeter.Orlando Bird is a journalist. He works at the Telegraph, where he is deputy editor on the Letters desk and writes about books and travel. His work has also appeared in the Financial Times and Literary Review. He lives in London.
Summary
Writer’s Letters is a collection of fascinating letters written by great writers, from Dickens to De Beauvoir
