The Books Briefing: What Personal Letters Reveal About Human Struggles

✍️ Letters from T. S. Eliot to Emily Hale

The haunting last letters of Sylvia Plath

“It’s the letters home, the letters to her mother, that ring most pitifully with the strained note of heartiness that all melancholiacs will recognize: the daily effort of a depressed person to get over herself, to get it together.”

📚 The Letters of Sylvia Plath Volume 2: 1956–1963, edited by Peter K. Steinberg and Karen V. Kukil

The intimate, political power of the open letter

“In different ways, these letters balance two aims: to enlighten the outside world and, perhaps more importantly, to share tactics of survival and resistance with kin and whoever else might need them.”

📚 Radical Hope: Letters of Love and Dissent in Dangerous Times, edited by Carolina De Robertis

Letters from Georgia O’Keeffe, Alfred Stieglitz, Ernest Hemingway, and more

“[These] five chronicles of famous correspondence … shed new light on the hearts and minds of cultural icons.”

📚 Dear Genius: The Letters of Ursula Nordstrom, edited by Leonard Marcus

📚 My Faraway One: Selected Letters of Georgia O’Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz: Volume One, 1915–1933, edited by Sarah Greenough

📚 The Letters of Ernest Hemingway: Volume 1, 1907–1922, edited by Sandra Spanier and Robert W. Trogdon

📚 Steinbeck: A Life in Letters, edited by Elaine Steinbeck and Robert Wallsten

📚 Floating Worlds: The Letters of Edward Gorey and Peter F. Neumeyer, edited by Peter F. Neumeyer

Letters from the Dust Bowl

“When drought struck Oklahoma in the 1930s, the author and her husband stayed behind to protect their 28-year-old farm. Her letters to a friend paint a picture of dire poverty, desiccated soil, and long days with no sunshine.”

✍️ Letters from Caroline A. Henderson to her friend Evelyn

About us: This week’s newsletter is written by Myles Poydras. The book he’s reading right now is Teaching a Stone to Talk, by Annie Dillard.

Comments, questions, typos? Reply to this email to reach the Books Briefing team.

Did you get this newsletter from a friend? Sign yourself up.

Myles Poydras is an editorial fellow at The Atlantic.