If there is one thing more depressing than reading other people’s old letters it is reading one’s own. – The Letters of T.S. Eliot, Volume 3: 1926-1927 Volume 3 of The Letters of T.S. Eliot picks up where the first and second volumes left off, chronicling the years 1926-1927, a
When Anna Catherine Bahlmann was twenty-four years old, a young girl named Edith Jones became her newest student. Bahlmann constantly had to add more folklore and poetry to the German curriculum to satisfy Jones’ ever-expanding curiosity. Sensing the girl’s potential, Bahlmann carefully preserved the early letters exchanged between the two
Emily Bernard starts her biography, “This book is a portrait of a once controversial figure, Carl Van Vechten, a white man with a passion for blackness.” And while today more people can recognize Carl Van Vechten as a patron and leader of the black arts and Harlem Renaissance movement, in
Read an excerpt from Carl Van Vechten and the Harlem Renaissance Carl Van Vechten, the controversial patron of the Harlem Renaissance, was indeed a Renaissance man: art critic, novelist, adviser, social host and man-about-town. Yet in his role as a letter writer we see him as a passionate epistolary friend.
One of the joys and challenges of literary biography is deciding how to interpret the ripples that are made as each new nugget of information drops into that heady mixture of facts and figures, vibrant anecdotes and dynamic interpretations that make up what we call an author’s “life and work.”