From a letter by Samuel Beckett, dated February 14, 1957, responding with what he called “heart-felt sympathy” to queries from a German translator of his 1935 poetry collection Echo’s Bones…

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Creating the Lost Generation

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From a letter dated June 15, 2012, discovered in a Saks Fifth Avenue shopping bag by a customer. This year, a man claiming to be the author was identified by…

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From an online petition submitted in April to Piero Fassino, the mayor of Turin, requesting that he persuade the Spanish multinational NH Hotels not to name its new four-star location…

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From a letter sent last November to the Campus Planning Board of the University of Colorado Boulder. Houusoo and Nowoo3 were nineteenth-century leaders of the Southern Arapaho in what is…

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From terms of address in The Animals: Love Letters Between Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy, edited by Katherine Bucknell, published last month by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Isherwood met Bachardy,…

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From a February 1952 letter sent by the film and theater director Elia Kazan to Darryl F. Zanuck, head of production at Twentieth Century-Fox. Zanuck rejected the proposal, calling it “original…

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From an April 7, 2012, letter by Mikhail Kalashnikov, the designer of the AK-47 assault rifle, to Patriarch Kirill, head of the Russian Orthodox Church. Kalashnikov died in December 2013; the letter…

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From a letter by Agafya Lykova, a seventy-year-old hermit living in the Siberian province of Khakassia, to Vladimir Pavlovsky, editor in chief of the Krasnoyarsk Worker newspaper, which published the…

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