Literary Collections : Letters

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 The 125 previously unpublished letters of this collection, housed at the Stanford University Library, document the broad range of Ricketts's interests and accomplishments during the last 12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. Katharine A. Rodger is a Steinbeck Fellow at San Jose State University more...

Price: $19.96

For Charles Olson, letters were not only a daily means of communication with friends but were at the same time a vehicle for exploratory thought. In fact, many of Oslo's finest works, including "Projective Verse" and the "Maxims Poems", were formulated as letters. more...

Price: $15.95

An intimate insight into Charlotte Bront--euml--;'s life at Haworth Parsonage, her experiences in a Belgian school, and her passionate attraction to Constantin Heger, husband of the school's directress. We learn of the astonishing success of Jane Eyre, Charlotte's agony over the early death of her brother Branwell and of Emily and Anne, and her secret correspondence with and tragically brief happy marriage to Arthur Nicholls, cut short by her death in 1855. - ;These letters give an insight into the life of a writer whose novels continue to be bestsellers. They reveal much about Charlotte Bront--euml--;'s personal life, her family relationships, and the society in which she lived. Many of her early letters are written with vigour, vivacity, and an engaging aptitude for self-mockery. In contrast, her letters to her 'master', the Belgian schoolteacher Constantin Heger, reveal her intense, obsessive longing for some response from him. Other. letters are deeply moving, when Charlotte endures the agony of her brother's and sisters' untimely deaths. We learn also of the progress of her writing, including the astonishing success of Jane Eyre, and of her contacts with her publishers, including the young George Smith; and we recognize in her letters. the life-experiences which are transmuted into the art of her novels. Contemporary society is brilliantly described in her letters from London, when she writes of her encounters with famous writers and with critics of her novels. We hear too of her visits to art galleries, operas, and the Great Exhibition of 1851 at the Crystal Palace. Dramatic letters written in December 1852 convey the 'turbulence of feeling' in the Haworth curate Arthur Nicholls's proposal of marriage to her and in Mr. Bront--euml--;'s violent reaction to it; and we subsequently hear of her secret correspondence with her suitor, her father's eventual consent, and her tragically brief happy marriage, cut short more...

Price: $49.95

Elisabetta Caminer Turra (1751-96) was one of the most prominent women in eighteenth-century Italy and a central figure in the international "Republic of Letters." A journalist and publisher, Caminer participated in important debates on capital punishment, freedom of the press, and the abuse of clerical power. She also helped spread Enlightenment ideas into Italy by promoting and publishing Voltaire's latest works and translating new European plays-plays she herself directed, to great applause, on Venetian stages. . Bringing together Caminer's letters, poems, and journalistic writings, nearly all published for the first time here, Selected Writings offers readers an intellectual biography of this remarkable figure as well as a glimpse into her intimate correspondence with the most prominent thinkers of her day. But more important, Selected Writings provides insight into the passion that animated Caminer's fervent reflections on the complex and shifting condition of women in her society-the same passion that pushed her to succeed in the male-dominated literary professions. more...

Price: $21.00

In a gripping exchange of letters written in the closing years of the 20th century, two men struggle to come to terms with the signal event of their time, the Holocaust. Born in the Rhineland-Palatinate region of Germany in the early part of the 20th century, both bore witness to the turbulent years of the Weimar Republic, Hitler, World War II, and the Holocaust. But their perspectives were entirely different. more...

Price: $23.95