Who Doesn't Love Getting Mail?

Initially it seems too invasive to read the personal letters of an author. These are the unpublished, private thoughts of creative geniuses, people we respect and admire for their capacity to tell a story. But curiosity becomes too much, we want to know what they were like: the men and women behind our favorite books. We submit, for your enjoyment, great volumes of correspondence between authors, their friends, their fans, and their critics.

Kurt Vonnegut: Letters . "Best thunderclap came from Spengler, to the effect that science is either true or false, art is either shallow or deep. Second best came from some Supreme Court Justice, Jackson, I think, to the effect that one man's right to swing his fists stops where another man's nose begins."

Dear Mark Twain: Letters from His Readers . "Once I saw you. I was only a child — but I marked that day with a white stone. You were driving, and it was all I could do to keep myself from running after your carriage and crying, 'Please, Mr. Mark Twain, stay long enough to speak to a little girl who thinks you are the greatest man on earth.''"

Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg: The Letters . "Tonight while walking on the waterfront in the angelic streets I suddenly wanted to tell you how wonderful I think you are. Please don't dislike me. What is the mystery of the world?"

Habit of Being: Flannery O'Connor . "I have been getting some very funny fan mail-a lot of it from gentlemen who have got no farther than the title-'Do you really think a good man is hard to find? I am 31 years old, single, work like a dog...' etc. etc. etc.... One from a West Virginia mountaineer whose favorite word is 'literature' which he spells 'litatur.'"

Selected Letters of Willa Cather . "The West always paralyzes me a little. When I am away from it I remember only the tang on the tongue. But when I come back [I] always feel a little of the fright I felt when I was a child. I always feel afraid of losing something, and I don’t in the least know what it is."

The Diary of Frida Kahlo . "Truth is, so great, that I wouldn’t like to speak, or sleep, or listen, or love. To feel myself trapped, with no fear of blood, outside time and magic, within your own fear, and your great anguish, and within the very beating of your heart."