Page 6 | Harper's Magazine

Correspondence

Class Struggle

From almost 2,000 comments about student loans sent to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and released on its website last June. Americans currently owe more than $1 trillion in outstanding…

St. Paul’s Curse

by Owen O’Malley,

From a May 24, 1943, memo to British foreign secretary Anthony Eden, from Owen O’Malley, the British ambassador to the Polish government in exile, in the collection of the Franklin…

Collateral Damage

From more than 8,000 letters to executives and directors of banks, posted last fall on the website Occupy the Boardroom and emailed to the addressees. A selection of 150 letters,…

Cop au vin

by Didier Mangione,Translated by Ryann Liebenthal,

From an April 18, 2011, letter by Didier Mangione, the national secretary of the French union Unité SGP Police, to Hubert Weigel, head of France’s riot police. Weigel banned on-duty…

Fulsome Prison

by Danny Hembree,

From a letter sent in January to the Gaston Gazette, a North Carolina newspaper, by Danny Hembree, a fifty-year-old death-row inmate at Raleigh’s Central Prison. Hembree was found guilty last…

The Cake Killer

by Jerzy N. Kosinski,

From “ ‘Being There’ in Toronto,” a May 3, 1987, speech by Jerzy Kosinski. Oral Pleasure, a collection of Kosinski’s speeches, essays, and interviews, edited by Barbara Tepa Lupack and Kiki…

Give Bleach a Chance

by John Lennon,

From a 1979 letter by John Lennon to a laundry in New York City, where Lennon lived with his wife, Yoko Ono. The John Lennon Letters was published by Little,…

Piggy Bank

by William Styron,

From a June 8, 1972, letter by William Styron to Frederick Exley, the author of A Fan’s Notes, who was a guest lecturer at the University of Iowa that year.…

Regime Changes

by Lamis Omar,

From emails sent last year, purportedly to Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, by Lamis Omar, a Ph.D. student working as his translator. The emails were among hundreds recovered by WikiLeaks and…

To have and have shot

by Ernest Hemingway,

A great consolation

by Christopher Tayler,

The postwar unmaking of Samuel Beckett