Literature Correspondence

Softcover. London, Village Press, 1st, 1975, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 367 pages. Volume 1 only. Selected and edited by Malcolm Elwin. With his younger brother Llewelyn, to whom he had been an impressive protective figure since childhood, he spoke almost without reserve, although the tow brothers were fundamentally so different, one from the other, as brothers can be. John's imaginative ability to put himself in another's place, together with his acute awareness of human suffering, made it impossible for him to wound. Llewelyn's vivid, spontaneous and sensual response to life was sometimes not so sensitive to the feelings of others.Had their understanding not been so deeply rooted he might have wounded John by his outspoken criticism of his brother's undisciplined and torrential writing power. But in literary criticism he did not surpass John, who could and did point out flaws in Llewelyn's own work. The Mutual criticism was only one aspect of the constant exchange, when they were apart, of their thoughts and feelings in an unending flow of letters. Spine faded, a clean copy.

Hardcover. Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 3rd pr., 1905, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Poor, Two hardcover volumes in worn, soiled dust jackets. Dark green cloth covers with gilt titles to upper covers and spines. As a result of djs, both volumes are bright and clean, 261. 243 pages. No markings.

Hardcover. San Diego, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1st, 1989, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dist jacket, 616 pages, b&w illustrations. These letters were written to his wife, Virginia Woolf, and to a number of friends and family members. They provide a fascinating look into the life and work of one of the most important British writers of the 20th century. Clean, like new.

Hardcover. NY, Random House, 1st, 1949, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover in an edgeworn, price-clipped dust jacket, 462 pages. Stated first printing, frontis portrait of Proust taken in 1890. Chipping to dust jacket. Several pages dog-eared. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1st, 1974-1981, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, All six volumes. Hardcover with dust jackets. Release dates range from 1974-1981. All first editions. Volume six has clipped dust jacket. Light fraying to dust jackets otherwise, clean, tight copies. Decorative staining on top text block. Black and white dust jacket.

Hardcover. NY, Thomas Y. Crowell, nd, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, green cloth stamped in gilt, 763 pages. Ex-lib with minimal markings. Arranged and edited by her husband. Frontis portrait, b&w illustrations.

Hardcover. New York, Blue Rider Press, 1st, 2016, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 336 pages. Hardcover with dust jacket. Clean, unmarked copy with only minor wear to dust jacket. Black and white illustrations and pictures throughout.

Hardcover. NY, Random House;, 1st, 2020, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 220 pages. Kurt Vonnegut's eldest daughter, Edith, was cleaning out her mother's attic when she stumbled upon a dusty, aged box. Inside, she discovered an unexpected treasure: more than two hundred love letters written by Kurt to Jane, spanning the early years of their relationship.The letters begin in 1941, after the former schoolmates reunited at age nineteen, sparked a passionate summer romance, and promised to keep in touch when they headed off to their respective colleges. And they did, through Jane's conscientious studying and Kurt's struggle to pass chemistry. The letters continue after Kurt dropped out and enlisted in the army in 1943, while Jane in turn graduated and worked for the Office of Strategic Services in Washington, D.C. They also detail Kurt's deployment to Europe in 1944, where he was taken prisoner of war and declared missing in action, and his eventual safe return home and the couple's marriage in 1945.

Hardcover. London , B. Blake, 1st Thus, 1837, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: None, 848 pages. Hardcover. Marbled edges and endpapers. Raised bands on spine. Clipping of a silhouette of Edward Gibbon pasted on to front end paper. Previous owners notes in pencil on front endpapers. Wear to covers, especially corners. Rubbing. Chipping at spine. Clean, unmarked text.

Hardcover. Ithaca NY, Cornell University Press, 1st, 2001, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 336 pages. This single-volume selection of the letters of Margaret Fuller affords a unique opportunity for renewed acquaintance with a great American thinker of the Transcendentalist circle. The letters represent Fuller at all stages of her life and career, and show her engaged as literary critic, as translator and as champion of German literature and thought, as teacher, as travel writer, as literary editor, as journalist, as feminist, as revolutionary, as wife and mother. My Heart Is a Large Kingdom, unlike previous collections, includes only letters transcribed from Fuller's manuscripts and does not reproduce correspondence known only from printed sources and copies in hands other than Fuller's. Among the recipients of the letters in this generous selection are such literary and cultural figures as Bronson Alcott, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Arthur Hugh Clough, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Giuseppe Mazzini, Giovanni Angelo Ossoli (Fuller's husband), George Ripley, and Henry David Thoreau. Taken together, the letters serve as a chronicle of Fuller's lifetime and provide glimpses into her thoughts and feelings during the years of the "Conversations," Dial, and the revolution in Rome. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Night Shade Books, 1st, 2002, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 439 pages. Hardcover with facsimile copy of handwritten letters to endpapers. Black cloth covered boards with iridescent titles to cover & spine. Frontispiece illustration of H. P. Lovecraft & Donald Wandrei in black & white. Dust jacket with light, marginal wear to edges. Tight binding, sharp corners, clean & unmarked pages.

Hardcover. Nashville TN, Vanderbilt University Press, 1st, 1969, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 271 pages. The first English translation of the last work of Gogol to be published during his lifetime. The only important nonfiction prose work of the Russian novelist, the*e thirty-two critical essays, written in the form of personal letters, define Gogol's views on religion, morality, and aesthetics and provide a key to the underlying motives and messages of his earlier fiction, including Dead Souls and The Inspector General. Translated from the Russian by Jesse Zeldin.

Hardcover. Cape Town, Oxford University Press, 1st, 1968, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Blue cloth covers with embossed design, gilt lettering on spine. Writings from the author best known for "The Story of an African Farm". 214 pages, no markings. Owner's small embossed stamp on front fly leaf.

Hardcover. London, Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1st, 1817, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, 3/4 brown calf over marbled boards, black leather spine label with gilt lettering. 303 pages. Containing, among others, many letters from Alexander Pope, and three from Dr. Johnson, being addressed to Francis Fowke, Joseph Fowke and Samuel Richardson. Mild wear to spine, otherwise a clean, tight copy.

Hardcover. NY, Liveright Publishing , 1st, 2021, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. Published on the centenary of her birth, Patricia Highsmith's diaries "offer the most complete picture ever published" of the canonical author. Relegated during her lifetime to the pulpy genre of mystery, Patricia Highsmith has emerged since her death in 1995 as one of "our greatest modernist writers" (Gore Vidal). Presented for the first time, this one-volume assemblage of her diaries and notebooks -- posthumously discovered behind Highsmith's linens and culled from more than 8,000 pages by her devoted editor, Anna von Planta -- traces the mesmerizing double-life of an artist who "[worked] like mad to be something." Beginning in 1941 during her junior year at Barnard, the diaries exhibit the intoxicating "atmosphere of nameless dread" (Boston Globe) that permeates classics such as Strangers on a Train and the Ripley series. In her skewering of McCarthy-era America, her prickly disparagement of contemporary art, her fixation on love and writing, and ever-percolating prejudices, the famously secretive Highsmith reveals the roots of her psychological angst and acuity. In one of the most compulsively readable literary diaries to publish in generations. Remainder dot to top edge, otherwise like new.

Hardcover. NY, Liveright Publishing , 1st, 2021, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. Published on the centenary of her birth, Patricia Highsmith's diaries "offer the most complete picture ever published" of the canonical author. Relegated during her lifetime to the pulpy genre of mystery, Patricia Highsmith has emerged since her death in 1995 as one of "our greatest modernist writers" (Gore Vidal). Presented for the first time, this one-volume assemblage of her diaries and notebooks -- posthumously discovered behind Highsmith's linens and culled from more than 8,000 pages by her devoted editor, Anna von Planta--traces the mesmerizing double-life of an artist who "[worked] like mad to be something." Beginning in 1941 during her junior year at Barnard, the diaries exhibit the intoxicating "atmosphere of nameless dread" (Boston Globe) that permeates classics such as Strangers on a Train and the Ripley series. In her skewering of McCarthy-era America, her prickly disparagement of contemporary art, her fixation on love and writing, and ever-percolating prejudices, the famously secretive Highsmith reveals the roots of her psychological angst and acuity. In one of the most compulsively readable literary diaries to publish in generations. Remainder dot to top edge, otherwise like new.

Hardcover. Boston, Houghton Mifflin , 1st, 1985, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover in a dust jacket, 540 pages. A comprehensive collection of letters from Jarrell. Edited by his second wife Mary Jarrell with the assistance of Stuart Wright. Jarrell's letters span over fifty years and document his life, thoughts, and writing. The letters are insightful and often humorous, and provide a unique perspective on the author's life and work. Paper covered boards with a cloth spine, dust jacket with mild soil, stain. No markings.

Hardcover. NY, Alfred A. Knopf, 1st, 2001, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 356 pages, b&w illustrations. INSCRIBED BY THE EDITOR EMILY BERNARD on the title page. Langston Hughes is widely remembered as a celebrated star of the Harlem Renaissance -- a writer whose bluesy, lyrical poems and novels still have broad appeal. What's less well known about Hughes is that for much of his life he maintained a friendship with Carl Van Vechten, a flamboyant white critic, writer, and photographer whose ardent support of black artists was peerless.Despite their differences a Van Vechten was forty-four to Hughes twenty-two when they met. Hughes and Van Vechten's shared interest in black culture lead to a deeply-felt, if unconventional friendship that would span some forty years. Between them they knew everyone from Zora Neale Hurston to Richard Wright, and their letters, lovingly and expertly collected here for the first time, are filled with gossip about the antics of the great and the forgotten, as well as with talk that ranged from race relations to blues lyrics to the nightspots of Harlem, which they both loved to prowl. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Simon & Schuster , 1st, 2023, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 509 pages. Remembrance offers the first sustained look at the author's life in letters from his late teens to his ninth decade. Bradbury's correspondence was far-reaching--he interacted with a rich cross-section of 20th-Century cultural figures, writers, film directors, editors, and others who simply wanted insights or encouragement from a writer who had enriched their lives through his stories and novels. Bradbury scholar and biographer, Jonathan R. Eller, organized this volume into categories of correspondents, showing Bradbury's progression through life as he knew it, and not necessarily as the public perceived him. Letters to and from mentors and other writers are followed by correspondence with such film directors as John Huston, Francois Truffaut, and Federico Fellini. Letters with publishers and agents are followed by letters that capture moments of national and international recognition, the shadows of war and family members who shared the memories of his life. Among the writers whose letters illuminate Remembrance are Theodore Sturgeon, Sir Arthur C. Clarke, Twilight Zone writers Charles Beaumont and Richard Matheson, Dan Chaon, Bernard Berenson, Nobel Laureate Bertrand Russell, Graham Greene, Anais Nin, Gore Vidal, Carl Sandburg, and Jessamyn West. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Francestown NH, Marshall Jones Company, 3rd pr., 1967, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover, blue cloth stamped in gilt. Dust jacket edgeworn, chipped. 295 pages. Revised Edition. Third Printing. INSCRIBED by Rosamond Thaxter ("Rosie") on half title page.

Softcover. Santa Rosa CA, Black Sparrow Press, 1st pbk, 1997, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 340 pages. The majority of the letters in this collection pertain to Reznikoff's personal life, addressed chiefly to his wife, Marie Syrkin, and his lifelong friend and sometime employer in Hollywood, Albert Lewin.

Hardcover. NY, Farrar, Straus and Young, 1st, 1953, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, burgundy cloth, 281 pages. Translated and edited with an introduction by Francis Steegmuller. Light fading to spine, name on front fly leaf, otherwise tight and clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Henry Holt, 1st, 2006, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 531 pages. Martha Gellhorn's reporting career brought her to the front lines of virtually every significant conflict from the Spanish Civil War to the end of the cold war. While Gellhorn's wartime dispatches rank among the best of the century, her personal letters are their equal: as vivid and fascinating as her reporting was trenchant. Gellhorn's correspondence introduces us to the woman behind the often inscrutable journalist, chronicling her friendships with twentieth-century luminaries as well as her tempestuous marriage to Ernest Hemingway. Caroline Moorehead, Gellhorn's critically acclaimed biographer, was granted exclusive access to the letters. This expertly edited volume contextualizes Gellhorn's correspondence within the arc of her entire life; the result is an intimate portrait of one of the most accomplished women of modern times.

Hardcover. NY, Random House, 1st, 2015, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. 867 pages. Over the course of a nearly sixty-year career, Norman Mailer wrote more than 30 novels, essay collections, and nonfiction books. Yet nowhere was he more prolific or more exposed than in his letters. All told, Mailer crafted more than 45,000 pieces of correspondence (approximately 20 million words), many of them deeply personal, keeping a copy of almost every one. Now the best of these are published most for the first time in one remarkable volume that spans seven decades and, it seems, several lifetimes. Together they form a stunning autobiographical portrait of one of the most original, provocative, and outspoken public intellectuals of the twentieth century. Compiled by Mailer s authorized biographer, J. Michael Lennon, and organized by decade, Selected Letters of Norman Mailer features the most fascinating of Mailer s missives from 1940 to 2007 letters to his family and friends, to fans and fellow writers (including Truman Capote, James Baldwin, and Philip Roth), to political figures from Henry Kissinger to Bill and Hillary Clinton, and to such cultural icons as John Lennon, Marlon Brando, and even Monica Lewinsky.