Heirlooms: Letters From a Peach Farmer by David Mas Masumoto
“Masumoto is an American farmer whose family arrived from Japan in 1898 and today embodies a century long history of farming “the other California,” the agriculturally rich Central Valley . . . As literary essays, Masumoto’s letters are occasionally uneven. His unwavering adherence to the letter format sometimes adds an “aw, shucks” clumsiness, especially in [...]
The Letters of Noël Coward edited by Barry Day
“In 1949, Noël Coward wrote to his childhood friend Esme Wynne, who was trying to get him to find God: “My philosophy is as simple as ever. I love smoking, drinking, moderate sexual intercourse on a diminishing scale, reading and writing (not arithmetic). I have a selfless absorption in the well-being and achievements of Noël [...]
My Dearest Friend: Letters of Abigail and John Adams, edited by Margaret A. Hogan and C. James Taylor
“Generations from now, what will your personal writings reveal about you and the time in which you lived? Would you want them preserved, or destroyed? Former first lady Martha Washington destroyed most of her letters from George. Mother Teresa had not wanted her letters to see daylight. Fortunately, the illustrious Adams family of Massachusetts has [...]
Graham Greene: A Life in Letters, edited by Richard Greene
“Richard Greene (no relation), a professor of English at the University of Toronto, has edited a collection of Graham Greene’s letters. The novelist once estimated that he wrote 2000 letters a year, and he lived to be 86: publishing all those letters would have taken decades. The editor has sifted through Greene’s correspondence and come [...]
The Letters of John Murray to Lord Byron, edited by Andrew Nicholson
“The superbly edited and extraordinarily modestly priced Letters of John Murray to Lord Byron is an invaluable resource with which to find out exactly how a promising early nineteenth-century author was marketed and promoted by his entrepreneurial young publisher, and how this most competitive of writers, in turn, kept his finger on the literary pulse.” [...]
Aldous Huxley: Selected Letters, by edited by James Sexton
“Aldous Huxley and Maria Nys met at Garsington in 1916. He was in his early twenties, she still in her teens. She was exceptionally attractive – as her photographs show. They married in 1918 and lived together happily and more or less inseparably until her death in 1955. That event is recorded with a mixture [...]