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People and Their Letters
Pantheon
November 2009
On Sale: November 10, 2009
352 pages ISBN: 0679444262 EAN: 9780679444268 Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
From the author of A Book of One’s Own and Stolen Words
comes a delightful and wide-ranging investigation of the
art of letter writing. Yours Ever explores the offhand masterpieces dispatched
through the ages by messenger, postal service, and
BlackBerry. Thomas Mallon weaves a remarkable assortment of
epistolary riches into his own insightful and eloquent
commentary on the circumstances and characters of the
world’s most intriguing letter writers. Here are Madame de
Sévigné’s devastatingly sharp reports from the court of
Louis XIV, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s tormented advice to his
young daughter, the besotted midlife billets-doux of a
suddenly rejuvenated Woodrow Wilson, the casually brilliant
spiritual musings of Flannery O’Connor, the lustful
boastings of Lord Byron, the cries from prison of Sacco and
Vanzetti. Along with the confessions and complaints and
revelations sent from battlefields, frontier cabins, and
luxury liners, a reader will find Mallon considering travel
bulletins, suicide notes, fan letters, and hate mail–forms
as varied as the human experiences behind them. Yours Ever is an exuberant reintroduction to a vast and
entertaining literature–a book that will help to revive, in
the digital age, this glorious lost art.
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