Yours Ever: People and Their Letters »

Thomas Mallon is the author of seven novels, including Henry and Clara, Dewey Defeats Truman, and Fellow Travelers. He is a frequent contributor to The New Yorker, The New York Times Book Review, and The Atlantic Monthly. He lives in Washington, D. C.

A delightful investigation of the art of letter writing, Yours Ever explores masterpieces dispatched through the ages by messenger, postal service, and BlackBerry.
 
Here are Madame de Sévigné’s devastatingly sharp reports from the French court, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s tormented advice to his young daughter, the casually brilliant musings of Flannery O’Connor, the lustful boastings of Lord Byron, and the prison cries of Sacco and Vanzetti, all accompanied by Thomas Mallon’s own insightful commentary. From battlefield confessions to suicide notes, fan letters to hate mail, Yours Ever is an exuberant reintroduction to a vast and entertaining literature—a book that will help to revive, in the digital age, this glorious lost art.

The Barnes & Noble Review

It was brought home to me in graduate school that Newton's Third Law, which otherwise so elegantly deals with reciprocal forces, fails to account for mail: the amount of pleasure a letter brings to its recipient induces more than an equal and opposite amount of guilt as it remains unanswered. Or is it just my amour propre as a terrible correspondent that makes me want to universalize my failings? I have no idea how large the class of sheepish dilatory letter writers is, but I do know that I've found some companions and some spurs to activity in Thomas Mallon's book on letters. Originally planned as a companion to A Book of One's Own, his anthology of diaries, it has appeared a trifle later than he had expected: "It embarrasses me to admit that I began writing this book when a first-class stamp cost twenty-nine cents."

Introduction 

ONE  Absence 
TWO  Friendship 
THREE  Advice FOUR  Complaint 
FIVE  Love SIX  Spirit 
SEVEN  Confession EIGHT  War NINE  Prison

Selected Bibliography Index