Literary Collections : Letters

Each working day from January 29 to November 1, 1951, John Steinbeck warmed up to the work of writing East of Eden with a letter to the late Pascal Covici, his friend and editor at The Viking Press. It was his way, he said, of "getting my mental arm in shape to pitch a good game.". Steinbeck's letters were written on the left-hand pages of a notebook in which the facing pages would be filled with the test of East of Eden. They touched on many subjects—story arguments, trial flights of worknamship, concern for his sons. Part autobiography, part writer's workshop, these letters offer an illuminating perspective on Steinbeck's creative process, and a fascinating glimpse of Steinbeck, the private man. more...

Price: $14.00

By the end of the fifteenth century, Cassandra Fedele (1465-1558), a learned middle-class woman of Venice, was arguably the most famous woman writer and scholar in Europe. A cultural icon in her own time, she regularly corresponded with the king of France, lords of Milan and Naples, the Borgia pope Alexander VI, and even maintained a ten-year epistolary exchange with Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand of Spain that resulted in an invitation for her to join their court. Fedele's letters reveal the central, mediating role she occupied in a community of scholars otherwise inaccessible to women. Her unique admittance into this community is also highlighted by her presence as the first independent woman writer in Italy to speak publicly and, more importantly, the first to address philosophical, political, and moral issues in her own voice. Her three public orations and almost all of her letters, translated into English, are presented here for the first time. more...

Price: $20.00

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Price: $31.95

When Johan Furuhjelm was offered the governorship of Russian America in 1858, the 37-year-old Finnish officer found himself in a quandary. He needed a wife to support him in the new post. Anna von Schoultz was chosen. The letters that she wrote from Siberia make up the present book and provide the reader with a fascinating portrait of private and public life in Alaska. more...

Price: $39.75

The first translation into English of the complete correspondence of the remarkable twelfth-century Benedictine abbess Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179), this study consists of nearly four hundred letters, in four projected volumes. Addressed to some of the most notable people of the day, as well as to some of humble status, the correspondence reveals the saint in ways her more famous works leave obscure: as determined reformer, as castigating seer, as theoretical musician, as patient adviser, as exorcist. Sometimes diffident and restrained, sometimes thunderously imperious, her letters are indispensable to understanding fully this luminary of medieval philosophy, poetry, and music. In addition, they provide a fascinating glimpse at life in tumultuous twelfth-century Germany, beset with schism and political unrest. This first volume includes ninety letters to the highest ranking prelates in Hildegard's world--popes, archbishops, and bishops. Three following volumes will be divided according to the rank of the addressees. more...

Price: $60.00